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How To Diagnose a Suddenly Slow Windows Computer?
Ensign Taco writes "I'm sure nearly every one of us has had it happen. All of a sudden your Windows PC slows to a crawl for no apparent reason. Yeah, we all like Linux because it doesn't do annoying things like this, but the Windows desktop still reigns supreme in most managed LAN work environments. I'm running XP with 4G of RAM and a decent CPU, and everything was fine, until one day — it wasn't. I've run spybot, antivirus, and looked at proc explorer — no luck. There is no one offending, obvious process. It seems every process decides to spike at once at random intervals. So I'm wondering if there's a few wizards out there that know what to look at. Could this be a very clever virus that doesn't run as a process? Or could this just be some random application error that's causing bad behavior? I've encountered this a few times with Windows PCs, but the solution has always been to just add more hardware. Has anyone ever successfully diagnosed this kind of issue?" And whether such a problem is related to malware or not, what steps would you take next?
No joke, I did this last week, and started using Chrome. Strangely, it works ok.
Firefox - sucks. Their stupid sqllite way they keep bookmarks eats my disk, and their dns lookups keep reverting to ipv6 even though it is disabled.
IE - sucks. The flash plugin just eats memory until it crashes at about 600MB of usage.
[sarcasm]
Like one day all of a sudden mounting your root file system as read only simply because you commited the horrible sin of gracefully shutting down one night and powering up the next day?
Things like that?
Linux? Never!
[/sarcasm]
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.