Is my new computer manic depressive or has it caught a horrible vi

[Guest]

About 2 months ago I retired my trusty old P4 2.8G machine and bought a new
2.6G Dual Core with 4Gb of RAM. I was hoping for a modest improvement in
speed as I also upgraded my old Photoshop CS2 to PS3. I stayed with XP home
as I am familiar with its operation and couldn't see any advantage in Vista.

The changeover has been a big disappointment as I feel like the new machine
has a serious case of manic depression - one minute running gee whiz fast and
then going painfully slow.

I know this sounds like a classic case of a malicious infection, so I have
scanned as deep as I can with AVG, Spybot, Defender, Adaware and turned up
nothing.

I have aslo monitored background services, system activity, processor
activity, wireless broadband activity, and even just listened to the HDD to
see if it is chugging away unneccesarily. I keep coming up with an apparently
clean bill of health. I ran chdisk\f and received no error reports. The only
suspicious event in the event log is a recurrent ati2mtag error which by the
look of google seems to affect half the machines on the planet with a radeon
graphics card. I tried all the recommended fixes for this (wind back driver,
update driver, install ati CC, none of them seem to change anything and the
monitor still works fine).

In short, the slow down doesn't seem to be related to the number or type of
applications running, and is impossible to predict. Today "we" have been
working brilliantly, but last night it took PS3 about 5 minutes to save a
small (400kb) JPEG file and my tablet stopped working. After a reboot
everything returned to normal, but there were no error events logged to
indicate anything had gone wrong. I despair!

Is this a virus, or have I missed some other form of dysfunctional behaviour?

All suggestions welcomed.

 

[Jim]

About 2 months ago I retired my trusty old P4 2.8G machine and bought a
new
2.6G Dual Core with 4Gb of RAM. I was hoping for a modest improvement in
speed as I also upgraded my old Photoshop CS2 to PS3. I stayed with XP
home
as I am familiar with its operation and couldn't see any advantage in
Vista.

The changeover has been a big disappointment as I feel like the new
machine
has a serious case of manic depression - one minute running gee whiz fast
and
then going painfully slow.

I know this sounds like a classic case of a malicious infection, so I have
scanned as deep as I can with AVG, Spybot, Defender, Adaware and turned up
nothing.

I have aslo monitored background services, system activity, processor
activity, wireless broadband activity, and even just listened to the HDD
to
see if it is chugging away unneccesarily. I keep coming up with an
apparently
clean bill of health. I ran chdisk\f and received no error reports. The
only
suspicious event in the event log is a recurrent ati2mtag error which by
the
look of google seems to affect half the machines on the planet with a
radeon
graphics card. I tried all the recommended fixes for this (wind back
driver,
update driver, install ati CC, none of them seem to change anything and
the
monitor still works fine).

In short, the slow down doesn't seem to be related to the number or type
of
applications running, and is impossible to predict. Today "we" have been
working brilliantly, but last night it took PS3 about 5 minutes to save a
small (400kb) JPEG file and my tablet stopped working. After a reboot
everything returned to normal, but there were no error events logged to
indicate anything had gone wrong. I despair!

Is this a virus, or have I missed some other form of dysfunctional
behaviour?

All suggestions welcomed.

What do the disk diagnostics show?
What are the results of a memory test? memtest86.exe is a popular
recommendation.

Just because it is new does not mean that there cannot be a hardware
failure. So, that is where I would go next.
Jim

 

[Guest]

--
Cheers, Al

What do the disk diagnostics show?
What are the results of a memory test? memtest86.exe is a popular
recommendation.

Just because it is new does not mean that there cannot be a hardware
failure. So, that is where I would go next.
Jim


Jim

Thank you for your reply.

I downloaded memtest86 ISO file, burned it to CD and set bios to boot from
CD/DVD drive. Nothing happened, Windows just started normally but slowly. I
went back to website (CybertronicPCsupport) and downloaded ubcd34-basic,
unzipped ISO file, burned to CD and tried to boot again. Nothing happened. I
checked BIOs and it says it is set to boot first from CD drive, but it is
still booting up normally as far as I can see.

What am I doing wrong?

 

[Guest]

Please ignore previous message about burning memtest32, I have now burned the
ISO file correctly and run the test overnight. No errors detected.

Good news in one way, but I'm still left wondering why this erratice
performance.

I monitored the processes and CPU activity during a slow down last night and
noted there were no changes in the level of page file utilised but CPU
activity jumped to 100% while I was processing a JPEG file in photoshop cs3.
Usually this only jumps to around 50% and the processing is almost
instantaneous. I haven't observed any other operations to detect whether this
is hardware or application specific.