poor performance and disk thrashing

[lost2ny]

The performance on my Dell Latitute laptop has degraded to the point of
absurdity. Programs take extremely long times to load or switch, and my
drive light flickers constantly. I've uninstalled all unneccissary
programs. I've gone in to MSConfig and disabled all unneccissary
startup programs and services. I've run complete system scans with
Norton Antivirus, Ad-Aware and Spybot (Spybot found a few things the
first run through, but it's clean now). I've used Norton System Works
and Abexo to clean and repair any defects in my registry. I've
defragmented my drive and my registry.

The most puzzling thing, to me is that although my task manager
indicates that Idle Processes CPU usage is hovering around 90%, yet my
total CPU usage is hovering at around 50%! Shouldn't the total CPU
usage be roughly 100 minus the Idle Proccesses CPU?

This is really driving me crazy, but I'm loath to reinstall Windows -
there should be some way to trace the problem.

 

[Carey Frisch [MVP]]

Go to Start > Run and type: SERVICES.MSC , and hit enter.
Scroll down to the "Indexing Service", right-click on it and select
Properties > Startup type and select Disabled.

4 Ways to Speed Up Your Computer's Performance
http://www.microsoft.com/atwork/getstarted/speed.mspx

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows - Shell/User
Microsoft Community Newsgroups
news://msnews.microsoft.com/

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

:

| The performance on my Dell Latitute laptop has degraded to the point of
| absurdity. Programs take extremely long times to load or switch, and my
| drive light flickers constantly. I've uninstalled all unneccissary
| programs. I've gone in to MSConfig and disabled all unneccissary
| startup programs and services. I've run complete system scans with
| Norton Antivirus, Ad-Aware and Spybot (Spybot found a few things the
| first run through, but it's clean now). I've used Norton System Works
| and Abexo to clean and repair any defects in my registry. I've
| defragmented my drive and my registry.
|
| The most puzzling thing, to me is that although my task manager
| indicates that Idle Processes CPU usage is hovering around 90%, yet my
| total CPU usage is hovering at around 50%! Shouldn't the total CPU
| usage be roughly 100 minus the Idle Proccesses CPU?
|
| This is really driving me crazy, but I'm loath to reinstall Windows -
| there should be some way to trace the problem.

 

[Gerry Cornell]

How much RAM memory? Try Ctrl+Alt+Delete to select Task Manager and
click the Performance Tab. What is the Total, the Commit Charge and the
Peak?

You may check on pagefile (virtual memory) usage with Page File Monitor for
XP:
http://www.dougknox.com/

If you get anything much more than 20 / 30 mb virtual memory usage you
need to add RAM memory. The system uses virtual memory for a
limited number of tasks rather than RAM memory.

How large is your hard drive? Is it partitioned? How much free space on
each drive / partition. How is the drive formatted -FAT32 or NTFS. To
get this information whilst in Windows Explorer place the cursor on each
drive in turn, right click and select Properties.

What process is generating high CPU usage?

Task Manager is useful but you could look at another freeware utility
Process Explorer, which provides similar information but adds that
little bit extra towards seeing what the running processes represent.

For further information about Process Explorer see here:
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/procexp.shtml

To ascertain which service is causing the problem select the
process producing the high CPU usage, right click,
select Properties, Services. Note there are the full names and some
explanation of what each service does.

You will find further information on Services here:
http://majorgeeks.com/page.php?id=12

To trace the particular Service involved you need to turn off each
service in turn and then restore it noting what effect it has on CPU
usage. However, you need to take care and watch what other Services are
dependent on that service. When you click on the Dependencies tab allow
it a little time to display the information.


--

Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England

Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

[David H. Lipman]

From: "lost2ny" <[email protected]>

| The performance on my Dell Latitute laptop has degraded to the point of
| absurdity. Programs take extremely long times to load or switch, and my
| drive light flickers constantly. I've uninstalled all unneccissary
| programs. I've gone in to MSConfig and disabled all unneccissary
| startup programs and services. I've run complete system scans with
| Norton Antivirus, Ad-Aware and Spybot (Spybot found a few things the
| first run through, but it's clean now). I've used Norton System Works
| and Abexo to clean and repair any defects in my registry. I've
| defragmented my drive and my registry.
|
| The most puzzling thing, to me is that although my task manager
| indicates that Idle Processes CPU usage is hovering around 90%, yet my
| total CPU usage is hovering at around 50%! Shouldn't the total CPU
| usage be roughly 100 minus the Idle Proccesses CPU?
|
| This is really driving me crazy, but I'm loath to reinstall Windows -
| there should be some way to trace the problem.


Download MULTI_AV.EXE from the URL --
http://www.ik-cs.com/programs/virtools/Multi_AV.exe

To use this utility, perform the following...
Execute; Multi_AV.exe { Note: You must use the default folder C:\AV-CLS }
Choose; Unzip
Choose; Close

Execute; C:\AV-CLS\StartMenu.BAT
{ or Double-click on 'Start Menu' in C:\AV-CLS }

NOTE: You may have to disable your software FireWall or allow WGET.EXE to go through your
FireWall to allow it to download the needed AV vendor related files.

C:\AV-CLS\StartMenu.BAT -- { or Double-click on 'Start Menu' in C:\AV-CLS}
This will bring up the initial menu of choices and should be executed in Normal Mode.
This way all the components can be downloaded from each AV vendor's web site.
The choices are; Sophos, Trend, McAfee, Kaspersky, Exit this menu and Reboot the PC.

You can choose to go to each menu item and just download the needed files or you can
download the files and perform a scan in Normal Mode. Once you have downloaded the files
needed for each scanner you want to use, you should reboot the PC into Safe Mode [F8 key
during boot] and re-run the menu again and choose which scanner you want to run in Safe
Mode. It is suggested to run the scanners in both Safe Mode and Normal Mode.

When the menu is displayed hitting 'H' or 'h' will bring up a more comprehensive PDF help
file. http://www.ik-cs.com/multi-av.htm


* * * Please report back your results * * *

 

[lost2ny]

Actually I forgot to mention that I'd already turned off Indexing
Services. I've also done all of the things mentioned on the MS webpage
you recommended, most of which are discussed in my original post. The
one exception is "Detect and Repair Disk Errors" which I always do
before defragmenting my drive, so I was thinking of them as one thing.

 

[lost2ny]

How much RAM memory? What is the Total, the Commit Charge and the Peak?

Total: 512M
Commit Charge: 187M
Peak: 1.2G

Total: 40G total
Free: 11G free
Format: NTFS, 1 partition

I downloaded the program you recommeded and it's telling me some
interesting things: the missing CPU time is being used by hardware
interrupts. Since I've never used this program before, I have no basis
for comparison but that seems rather high. I'm going to run it on an
identical machine down the hall as soon as it's owner leaves it
unguarded. That should give me a clue.

Thanks for the link to Major Geeks - I'd forgotten all about them. I've
been using the WinTasks Process Library at
http://www.processlibrary.com/, which I think is pretty good, too.

 

[Gerry Cornell]

Can we recheck these figures

Total: 512M
Commit Charge: 187M
Peak: 1.2G

I seem to have used an old question I have since revised. Under Commit
Charge on the Performance tab what are the Total, the Limit, and the Peak?

Have you tried pagefile monitor yet?

I would not bother about hardware interupts. Just concentrate on what
programme application may be responsible for unexpected CPU usage.

--

Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England

Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

[Mak]

<snip>

I downloaded the program you recommeded and it's telling me some
interesting things: the missing CPU time is being used by hardware
interrupts. Since I've never used this program before, I have no basis
for comparison but that seems rather high. I'm going to run it on an
identical machine down the hall as soon as it's owner leaves it
unguarded. That should give me a clue.

Your actions:

help within PE should give you the clue:
"On Windows NT-based systems Process Explorer shows two artificial
processes: Interrupts and DPCs. These processes reflect the amount of time
the system spends servicing hardware interrupts and Deferred Procedure Calls
(DPCs), respectively. High CPU consumption by these activities can indicate
a hardware problem or device driver bug. To see the total number of
interrupts and DPCs executed since the system booted add the Context Switch
column. Another sometimes useful metric is the number of interrupts and DPCs
generated per refresh interval, which you see when you add the CSwitches
Delta column."

From there, you might want to search sysinternals site for more clues.
In google search:
interrupts site:sysinternals.com

-> can be that: http://www.sysinternals.com/Forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=965
from there -> MSKB:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;817472

If not, you can probably see what is responsible by following this:
http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/07/case-of-periodic-system-hangs.html

 

[lost2ny]

Good Call Mak! My laptop's primary IDE was somehow set to PIO mode. I
had no idea it could even do that by itself. After uninstalling the
channel and rebooting twice, everything seems to be back to normal.
There's still the nagging mystery of why it decided to flip to PIO, but
I'll probably get over it.

Many, many, many thanks!