Program really slow..

[shawn]

At work I'm using a 1.8 (maybe 1.9) Ghz PC with 1GB memory on Windows XP
with all the latest updates including SP3. I have an 18 gig drive with 1.5GB
free. I know they usually recommend keeping 10% free, but I've been like
this for awhile.

I don't have many things running when my computer starts up, although I do
have a few.

My CPU idles at about 4% usage. When I jiggle the mouse a little the CPU
usage will go up a little, if I jiggle the mouse faster I can get it to go
up to 100% sometimes. Most of the time around 77%. Is this normal?

But anyway on to the real problem. Everything is fairly slow and I know
this. The company won't upgrade our computers. But one piece of software
used to work fine. It's a programming language I use. It used to work fine
and all of the sudden out of nowhere it got slow. Sometimes opening it will
take a good 10 to 20 seconds. Then when you inside and you scroll up and
down through your code it'll be REALLY slow.. you know how you scroll in
your internet program (IE or Firefox) and it scrolls nice and smooth? In
this program what is happening now is it'll scroll one or two lines at a
time very slowly. With a 1.5 to 2 second pause in between each scroll. I can
just click on the scroll bar to the right instead, but then I have to wait
1.5 to 2 seconds for the screen to update, so I really can't tell if I've
scrolled to the right part.

Any thoughts on why all of the sudden only that program started to behave
weird?

It doesn't get installed.. it's just an EXE file you run. I've deleted it
and recopied it. No luck.

Sometimes it behaves fine, but out of nowhere it'll get all slow/laggy.
Sometimes it'll be slow and laggy, and I'll open up another program and
switch back, and it'll work fine.

I've already ran HiJack this to look for anything suspicious, have Symantec
installed on our office server, which scans all the individual computers,
etc. Already ran a defrag too. My system has always had this low disk space
and the program used to work fine.

 

[Big_Al]

shawn said this on 5/7/2009 4:26 PM:

At work I'm using a 1.8 (maybe 1.9) Ghz PC with 1GB memory on Windows XP
with all the latest updates including SP3. I have an 18 gig drive with 1.5GB
free. I know they usually recommend keeping 10% free, but I've been like
this for awhile.

I don't have many things running when my computer starts up, although I do
have a few.

My CPU idles at about 4% usage. When I jiggle the mouse a little the CPU
usage will go up a little, if I jiggle the mouse faster I can get it to go
up to 100% sometimes. Most of the time around 77%. Is this normal?

But anyway on to the real problem. Everything is fairly slow and I know
this. The company won't upgrade our computers. But one piece of software
used to work fine. It's a programming language I use. It used to work fine
and all of the sudden out of nowhere it got slow. Sometimes opening it will
take a good 10 to 20 seconds. Then when you inside and you scroll up and
down through your code it'll be REALLY slow.. you know how you scroll in
your internet program (IE or Firefox) and it scrolls nice and smooth? In
this program what is happening now is it'll scroll one or two lines at a
time very slowly. With a 1.5 to 2 second pause in between each scroll. I can
just click on the scroll bar to the right instead, but then I have to wait
1.5 to 2 seconds for the screen to update, so I really can't tell if I've
scrolled to the right part.

Any thoughts on why all of the sudden only that program started to behave
weird?

It doesn't get installed.. it's just an EXE file you run. I've deleted it
and recopied it. No luck.

Sometimes it behaves fine, but out of nowhere it'll get all slow/laggy.
Sometimes it'll be slow and laggy, and I'll open up another program and
switch back, and it'll work fine.

I've already ran HiJack this to look for anything suspicious, have Symantec
installed on our office server, which scans all the individual computers,
etc. Already ran a defrag too. My system has always had this low disk space
and the program used to work fine.

A well liked program for this kinda stuff is Malware Bytes anti-malware
program. And Crap Cleaner (ccleaner.exe) for cleanup. And
autoruns.exe for checking what loads on bootup. They can be found
easily on google. You might give them a try. Course with autoruns,
you kinda have to know what to look for, its not self diagnosing, its
just a tool.

More space on the hard drive does make disc caching work better. I
don't know the limits of it all, 1.8 gig free seems to be a good amount,
but if you didn't know, when memory runs out, XP uses the HD to store
temp info. That's one reason a PC running out of hard drive space
slows. You might off load a chunk for a test to see if more space
fixes the speed, even if you only do it for an hour to test.

 

[Paul]

At work I'm using a 1.8 (maybe 1.9) Ghz PC with 1GB memory on Windows XP
with all the latest updates including SP3. I have an 18 gig drive with 1.5GB
free. I know they usually recommend keeping 10% free, but I've been like
this for awhile.

I don't have many things running when my computer starts up, although I do
have a few.

My CPU idles at about 4% usage. When I jiggle the mouse a little the CPU
usage will go up a little, if I jiggle the mouse faster I can get it to go
up to 100% sometimes. Most of the time around 77%. Is this normal?

But anyway on to the real problem. Everything is fairly slow and I know
this. The company won't upgrade our computers. But one piece of software
used to work fine. It's a programming language I use. It used to work fine
and all of the sudden out of nowhere it got slow. Sometimes opening it will
take a good 10 to 20 seconds. Then when you inside and you scroll up and
down through your code it'll be REALLY slow.. you know how you scroll in
your internet program (IE or Firefox) and it scrolls nice and smooth? In
this program what is happening now is it'll scroll one or two lines at a
time very slowly. With a 1.5 to 2 second pause in between each scroll. I can
just click on the scroll bar to the right instead, but then I have to wait
1.5 to 2 seconds for the screen to update, so I really can't tell if I've
scrolled to the right part.

Any thoughts on why all of the sudden only that program started to behave
weird?

It doesn't get installed.. it's just an EXE file you run. I've deleted it
and recopied it. No luck.

Sometimes it behaves fine, but out of nowhere it'll get all slow/laggy.
Sometimes it'll be slow and laggy, and I'll open up another program and
switch back, and it'll work fine.

I've already ran HiJack this to look for anything suspicious, have Symantec
installed on our office server, which scans all the individual computers,
etc. Already ran a defrag too. My system has always had this low disk space
and the program used to work fine.

To start, benchmark with HDTune.

http://www.hdtune.com/hdtune_255.exe

The purpose of doing that, is to see whether the disk is in PIO mode or not.
A 7200RPM IDE (ribbon cable) disk, might manage 60MB/sec near the beginning
of the disk, and 40MB/sec near the end of the disk. On a brand new disk,
where there are few downward spikes in the plot, you can even see the
"zones" on the disk platter.

This is the curve for a relatively fast disk. Bandwidth ranges from 85MB/sec
down to about 55MB/sec on this one. My disks are a bit more modest in
performance.

http://www.legitreviews.com/images/reviews/699/hdtune_1500.jpg

You can check basic parameters of the CPU and memory, with this.

http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php

For a simple performance benchmark, you can try SuperPI. I use 1 million
digits for older processors, as those processors don't have a very large
L2 cache.

http://www.xtremesystems.com/pi/super_pi_mod-1.5.zip

(http://www.xtremesystems.com/pi/)

To get numbers to compare against, I use hwbot.org. This is for
a P4 1.8GHz Northwood. There are only a couple entries for stock
operating speed. I picked one here as an example.

http://www.hwbot.org/ResultBrowseByProcessor.do?cpuModelId=1316

207. CPU-Z - 1800.4 mhz - RomanLV (Over?lockers.?om.UA Team )
- (Pentium 4 1.8Ghz Northwood @ 1800mhz)
Time = 1 minute 39.4 seconds or 99.4 seconds total for 1 million digits

In addition to some basic benchmarks and checks, you can also use
Sysinternals Process Explorer, and see what percentage of time is
spent on DPC (deferred procedure calls, a part of servicing interrupts
at non-interrupt level) or interrupts. In some cases, there are chips
with known design problems, that create "interrupt storms", and that
can reduce visible performance. Interrupt related issues tend to be
hidden from the user. Sometimes certain interrupt issues even cause
problems with Windows time keeping accuracy (more than the normal
drift).

(Process Explorer)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

HTH,
Paul

 

[DL]

The actual free space reccomendation is 15% of formated size, less than that
and various utilities such as Disk Cleanup or Defrag may not run.
Based on that 2.7gb would seem to be needed for your PC

Scrolling probs in IE / Firefox can be as a result of the video driver,
perhaps you've been installing MS Update, driver updates, thereby trashing
your sys

 

[shawn]

Wow.. my hard drive is horrific. My minimum transfer rate was 3.7MB and Max
42.4. Spiked down a few times. The 3.7 was near the beginning of it's test.

 

[shawn]

There is one spot it always drops to 3.7. No matter how many times I run the
test.

 

[Paul]

There is one spot it always drops to 3.7. No matter how many times I run the
test.

I did some comparison tests here.

I have two 160GB disks. One has WinXP on it. The other has Win2K.

If I run HDTune from WinXP, and scan the WinXP disk, I see the spike.
If I run HDTune from Win2K, and scan the WinXP disk, the spike is gone.
If I run HDTune from Win2K, and scan the Win2K disk, I see the spike.

So it seems to be related to the fact that C: is on the scanned drive.

There can be more than one spike on a disk, and it can indicate a
section of the disk that has spared sectors or the like. I notice
that older disks seem to get more "spiky" than newer disks. My disks
are maybe a month old (I replaced both of the previous disks).

I also tried scanning with HDTach, and it looked... worse.

http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php?request=HdTach

I wouldn't get too alarmed at the spiking, unless most of the disk
seems to be affected.

Paul