Computer is annoyingly slow

[Mike S.]

I am trying to help someone with a computer problem and could use some
adivce.

This person says their computer became very slow after they finished
playing a computer game. I cannot figure out why it's so slow.

It's a new (3-4 month old) custom built computer running XP Home. It
has an Intel Core (2-?) Duo processor, 2GB RAM, and a 150GB hard
drive. They use AOL and Norton Internet Security 2005. I did two virus
scans using Norton Anti-virus and the Trend Micro Online scanner and
nothing was found. I did two spyware scans using AOL's spyware scanner
and an online spyware scanner. Some MyWebSearch toolbars were found
and I removed them. Using HijackThis I found a file called ofb1.dll
that is suppposedly a trojan, so I removed/fixed it. I also did a
rootkit scan and nothing was found.

I have checked for conflicts in the Device Manager and everything is
ok. I have disabled Startup items. In the task manager, everything
looks normal. The cpu usage is 2%, System Idle is 99, the memory usage
is low and doesn't look unusual.

I cannot think of anything else that would be causing this slowness.
Now when I say so I mean slow. It takes 30 min to open a folder and
then open an application. It takes over 10 minutes for all the desktop
items to load on a reboot. The only improvement I've seen is that now
when I open task manager, it shows up immediately and all the tabs are
now there. It wasn't coming up a few days ago. I ran defrag and also
chkdsk and no errors were found.

I cannot think of what else could be wrong. Does anyone have any
ideas?

I'd prefer to figure out what is wrong before doing a System Restore.

 

[Guest]

Just because it's new doesn't mean their not able to get some bad hardware or
bad assembly. I would contact the Support Group of the computer company. You
can get software issues from hardware going out.

 

[Guest]

Try opening CPU cabinet and touch the heat sink aluminum (check every one of
them ) if it is hot then the problem lies hardware i.e. It could be faulty
SMPS (Power supply) it should be minimum 500 watts as you have high end
hardware.

If thing are ok on hardware front reload system with removing all partitions
and then loading fresh OS.

 

[Richard in AZ]

Try this:
Go to MSCONFI and then services. Disable "Windows Image Acquisition" and reboot.
If that helps go to the Control Panel, Administrative tools and disable Windows Image Acquisition.
For some strange reason WIA can cause machines to become very slow in responding to explorer
functions.