B
BobJam
A little over a week ago, my XP (HE) began to visibly slow down. For
example, on startup the desktop icons would have the generic look and then
slowly refresh one by one. And another example, when opening a program, it
firsts displays partially and then the whole window comes up.
So, I started to troubleshoot. First, I loaded Task Manager in an effort to
see if any processes or applications were taking an unusual amount of
resources. Nothing that gave me a hint there.
Next I disabled indexing for searches, 'cause I thought maybe that was
slowing things down (though I had indexing on prior to this and it never
slowed things down like I'm seeing in my examples above). No joy there.
Then I though that maybe my prefetch files were gone and that was causing
this, but that wasn't the case.
I've scanned for spyware and viruses, but no joy there either (for once I
was hoping some malware would show up).
My swap file is fixed and defragmented, so that doesn't seem to be it
either.
MS came out with a bunch of updates on the 14th, so I thought maybe it was
one of them, and have been removing one by one, but still no joy there.
I've disabled all polling that some programs do for updates (like Adobe
Reader and Java), thinking that perhaps that was interrupting the display .
.. . but no joy there either.
I did update to Java Version 6 Update 10, which is listed as a Release
Candidate but is still really a beta, right around the time those MS Updates
came out and when my slow problem first started, so my next step will be to
either go back to Update 7, or just uninstall Java completely (I really
don't use it, and only have need of it when I do the Secunia online scan for
security update info).
Since beta's are essentially unfinished software, I'm thinking that maybe
Update 10 could be doing it.
I'm reluctant to bash MS Updates, but they have been known to screw things
up. However, on all the searches I've done I don't see anything about those
updates slowing things down, so I'm thinking that the MS Updates are
probably not the cause.
So . . . thoughts or ideas??
example, on startup the desktop icons would have the generic look and then
slowly refresh one by one. And another example, when opening a program, it
firsts displays partially and then the whole window comes up.
So, I started to troubleshoot. First, I loaded Task Manager in an effort to
see if any processes or applications were taking an unusual amount of
resources. Nothing that gave me a hint there.
Next I disabled indexing for searches, 'cause I thought maybe that was
slowing things down (though I had indexing on prior to this and it never
slowed things down like I'm seeing in my examples above). No joy there.
Then I though that maybe my prefetch files were gone and that was causing
this, but that wasn't the case.
I've scanned for spyware and viruses, but no joy there either (for once I
was hoping some malware would show up).
My swap file is fixed and defragmented, so that doesn't seem to be it
either.
MS came out with a bunch of updates on the 14th, so I thought maybe it was
one of them, and have been removing one by one, but still no joy there.
I've disabled all polling that some programs do for updates (like Adobe
Reader and Java), thinking that perhaps that was interrupting the display .
.. . but no joy there either.
I did update to Java Version 6 Update 10, which is listed as a Release
Candidate but is still really a beta, right around the time those MS Updates
came out and when my slow problem first started, so my next step will be to
either go back to Update 7, or just uninstall Java completely (I really
don't use it, and only have need of it when I do the Secunia online scan for
security update info).
Since beta's are essentially unfinished software, I'm thinking that maybe
Update 10 could be doing it.
I'm reluctant to bash MS Updates, but they have been known to screw things
up. However, on all the searches I've done I don't see anything about those
updates slowing things down, so I'm thinking that the MS Updates are
probably not the cause.
So . . . thoughts or ideas??
)