Troubleshooting Poor XP Performance?

[Guest]

Since upgrading from Windows 98 to XP Home Edition one year ago, performance has been very good and there have been few crashes or hung applications. However, that changed dramatically about a week ago. I updated McAfee VS and found the COREFLOOD virus, which was been removed. However, performance remains degraded. When I run the Performance Monitor tool in XP I see regular processor spikes, going to 99% to 100% processor capacity, about every 3 seconds

Is there a way to diagnose from this point, or do the symptoms sound familiar to any known problems? I can't find anything relevant on the MS Knowledge Base. From past experience, I suspect corrupt drivers or system files that can hang an application, but the process activity surges are occurring when very little is running. Any good advice is much appreciated.

 

[Juan]

Greetings:

It's probable the virus has geen restored in your system, that process
spiking to 99% must be the virus itself, select it and end the process, read
how to temporarily stop system restore and remove the virus for good.

Method of installation in the system.
http://www3.ca.com/threatinfo/virusinfo/virus.aspx?id=30240

How it restores in the system & how to disable system restore feature.
In this site perform a system scan if you need convincing.
http://www3.ca.com/threatinfo/collateral.aspx?cid=49579&areaid=54

To disable System Restore.
http://www.sarc.com/avcenter/venc/data/backdoor.coreflood.dr.html


Hope this helps.


-----------------------------Original Message-----------------------

Since upgrading from Windows 98 to XP Home Edition one year ago,

performance has been very good and there have been few crashes or hung
applications. However, that changed dramatically about a week ago. I
updated McAfee VS and found the COREFLOOD virus, which was been removed.
However, performance remains degraded. When I run the Performance Monitor
tool in XP I see regular processor spikes, going to 99% to 100% processor
capacity, about every 3 seconds.

Is there a way to diagnose from this point, or do the symptoms sound

familiar to any known problems? I can't find anything relevant on the MS
Knowledge Base. From past experience, I suspect corrupt drivers or system
files that can hang an application, but the process activity surges are
occurring when very little is running. Any good advice is much appreciated.

 

[Guest]

Juan, **thank you** for the timely reply. I did follow the McAfee instructions for running the scan, putting the system into Safe Mode. McAfee warned me that my scan would not be totally effective in the normal mode. Also, I no longer find any traces of the Coreflood virus (trojan, actually)

I notice in the system monitor that Explore.exe can use an unusually large amount of memory. I saw the value shoot up to 57,000 KB at times. I'm now wondering if the constant disk activity when doing routine things like browsing a web page or sending email might be due to low memory. In any Windows session I often get a "low virtual memory" warning after a few simple actions, using routine Microsoft applications. The processor spikes I mentioned before were about the same time interval as the Performance Monitor display refresh. Hmmm

I've learned from friends in desktop support that Windows performance problems often arise from corrupted drivers and system files. The only recourse sometimes is to reinstall the application or driver. I wish that there were a good diagnostic tool available. All I see on the MS Knowledge Base is trial and error - removing the tasks launched at startup and putting them back, one by one. Currently, I don't see a correlation between any particular app and performance. Performance is noticeably degraded from the reboot.