Slow XP System for everything

[D. Kirkpatrick]

This may have been answered here already but I have just joined this
Usneet group for some help.

I have an XP system here (HP personal system). It is actually my
wife's and is used for school. I have 2 W2K machines myself.

Here is the problem. Her system has cranked down to a standstill. It
takes (literally) a full minute for any MS Word document to open even
though I have a licensed copy of WORKS installed (OEM). Rebooting
(hot or cold) can result in having to wait as much as 10 or more full
minutes before the system is usable. During that time period the disk
activity light is on full as if the disk is being polled or scanned.

I have run various anti-spyware programs and also anti-virus programs
and am presently using Grisoft's package (free version for now). It
was suggested to me that the Norton Anti-Virus I was running might be
the causation of the slow speed. It recently expired so I uninstalled
it completely and rebooted then installed Grisoft's, which by the way
is working nicely on my W2K machines.

I have gone through the list of programs and have deleted anything we
don't need or which is/was suspicious. I cannot find any zombies
running and a lack of router LED or DSL LED modem action suggests that
there is nothing running in the background that I missed. Grissoft
kills off any tracking cookies daily and its AV reports the system is
clean.

Note this slow speed thing started way before I dumped Norton and
added Grisoft so that is not the problem.

The other day I ran a search for a file I could not locate and I
watched as the search window painfully cranked through files like
molasses.

I'm concerned that there may be a hardware issue but before I go that
route I want to be sure that I have done everything I can with respect
to settings.

I have cleaned out dead files using Disk Clean-up and also defrag'd
the thing.

I'm at a loss as to what is causing this.

Its only a 20 GB drive but is about 1/2 full at this point with school
documents, photos and music and the applications. I don't think this
is enough data to cause it to slow down.

What am I doing wrong and what do I need to check for settings?

Thanks.

DMK

 

[JS]

You need to find the specific process or application that's taking all
the CPU resources and slowing down your PC.

To do this try Process Explorer:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/SystemInformation/ProcessExplorer.mspx

Once you have Process Explorer installed and running:
In the taskbar select View and check 'Show Process Tree' and 'Show Lower
Pane' options.
(This will provide the detailed info you need)
Next click on the CPU column to sort processes by %CPU usage.
Then click on the process that's using most or all the CPU %,
once it's highlighted, right click and from the options listed select:
Search Online
This should display what out there on the web about that process.

Note: some entries like Explorer and svchost may need to be expanded to show
the detail,
(sub processes), in this case click on the + located to the left of the
entry.

Still another tool is What's Running
http://www.whatsrunning.net/whatsrunning/main.aspx

JS

 

[=?iso-8859-1?Q?_db_=B4=AF`=B7.._=3E=3C=29=29=29=BA]

see if windows performs
better in safemode, and
safemode w/networking too
and let us know...
--

<)))º>·´¯`·.¸. , . .·´¯`·.. ><)))º>`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸.·´¯`·...¸><)))º>

..

 

[C.Joseph Drayton]

This may have been answered here already but I have just joined this
Usneet group for some help.

I have an XP system here (HP personal system). It is actually my
wife's and is used for school. I have 2 W2K machines myself.

Here is the problem. Her system has cranked down to a standstill. It
takes (literally) a full minute for any MS Word document to open even
though I have a licensed copy of WORKS installed (OEM). Rebooting
(hot or cold) can result in having to wait as much as 10 or more full
minutes before the system is usable. During that time period the disk
activity light is on full as if the disk is being polled or scanned.

I have run various anti-spyware programs and also anti-virus programs
and am presently using Grisoft's package (free version for now). It
was suggested to me that the Norton Anti-Virus I was running might be
the causation of the slow speed. It recently expired so I uninstalled
it completely and rebooted then installed Grisoft's, which by the way
is working nicely on my W2K machines.

I have gone through the list of programs and have deleted anything we
don't need or which is/was suspicious. I cannot find any zombies
running and a lack of router LED or DSL LED modem action suggests that
there is nothing running in the background that I missed. Grissoft
kills off any tracking cookies daily and its AV reports the system is
clean.

Note this slow speed thing started way before I dumped Norton and
added Grisoft so that is not the problem.

The other day I ran a search for a file I could not locate and I
watched as the search window painfully cranked through files like
molasses.

I'm concerned that there may be a hardware issue but before I go that
route I want to be sure that I have done everything I can with respect
to settings.

I have cleaned out dead files using Disk Clean-up and also defrag'd
the thing.

I'm at a loss as to what is causing this.

Its only a 20 GB drive but is about 1/2 full at this point with school
documents, photos and music and the applications. I don't think this
is enough data to cause it to slow down.

What am I doing wrong and what do I need to check for settings?

Thanks.

DMK

Hi DMK,

Sometimes it is good to get back to basics. I would do the
following in the order listed below.

1) Run a full scan with your AV software
2) Run a full scan with AdAware
3) Run a full scan with Spybot: Search & Destroy.
4) Run 'Disk Cleanup'.
5) Run 'PowerTweak' first Registry analyser than defragger.
6) Run 'Chkdsk /f'
7) Turn off the pagefile (in case it is fragmented
8) Run 'Defrag' actually the XP defragger is not very
good. I would recommend JKDefrag.
9) Create a fixed size pagefile (2x the amount of RAM)
by creating a fixed size pagefile, you will assure
that it doesn't get fragmented as you use your
machine.

As to step 5, there are many who say that Registry
compactors and such create more problems than they cure.
With PowerTweak, you can tell it to ONLY delete the entries
that it says can 'Safely be deleted'. If you don't know how
to check entries, then leave the rest of them alone. As to
the Registry Defragger, when you run it, it compacts as well
as defrags, and I have done 'real-world' speed tests, and it
does make a difference.

One other thing I would recommend is turning off the
'indexing Service'. Just turning it off for the drive does
not stop it from using processing cycles (I don't know why
that it, but I can watch DTaskManager and see that that
svchost object runs and uses processor cycles intermittently.

Your machine should now being running faster. The next thing
I would recommend is running a freeware program like StatBar
so that you can see your processor use at all time. If your
processor pegs out, then bring up the Task Manager and go to
the 'Processes' tab and click on the 'CPU' header twice.
This will tell you what program is pegging out your processor.

You might be surprised at the results. There is a program I
like called Weather Pulse. Every other day at different
times it will peg out the processor. I haven't figured out
why it does it, but it does. I kill the process and re-run
the application. I am okay for another couple of days then
it occurs again.

I wrote the developer, but haven't heard back from them as
to why this is occurring.

Ciao . . . C.Joseph

"A promise is nothing more than an attempt,
to respond to an unreasonable request."