Strange issues

[me10lee83]

All of a sudden my Dell laptop (just over a year old, go figure it starts
acting up as soon as the warranty expired) has started acting funny. Here's
some of the issues that started happening all of a sudden

-It runs super slow at times and freezes up, svchost.exe seems to be taking
a lot of resources up when that's happening
-The memory card reader doesn't work. It makes the noise that a new device
has been recognized when I put one it, but it never shows up as a drive in My
Computer.
-Both firefox and IE aren't loading some sites. I'm connected to the
internet and some sites load just fine and others never seem to load- and
it's not that the site is down. My google customized homepage will load, but
I can't do any searches (either from the page or from the search toolbar in
both IE and firefox), weather.com won't load- and the list seems to grow.

My first thought was I have some type of spyware even though I'm very good
about not downloading stuff so I ran a ad-aware scan and it came up with
nothing. I also ran a hijackthis scan and everything was normal there too.

Any thoughts on what's causing any of these issues or how I can fix them?

 

[me10lee83]

When I look in task manager Explorer.exe is running around 99,000 - 120,000
kb- on my other computer it only runs around 14,000, that big of a difference
is not normal

I ran ccleaner and fixed a whole ton of things found. It doesn't seem to
have fixed the issue of the progresses running on more memory than usual or
the internet issue.

The list of sites I can't access is growing, and what sites can and which
ones can't doesn't seem to follow any pattern- I can access google & gmail.
but it won't perform a search. I can access and log into my banking sites,
ebay, and other random sites. But I can't access weather.com, the Neosmart
forums, the Dell community forums, dell.com, and others. I can access
facebook.com, but I can't log on.


I also have Process Explorer and can save and send a log file if need be.
There's a lot of stuff highlighted in pink- all under services.exe and
lsas.exe. Under services, the svchost.exe process (dcom server process
launcer) has a couple of McAffee processes highlighted in blue and
wmiprvse.exe is in dark orange/brown.
Explorer.exe and all processes under it are highlighted in blue- under it
would be the programs I have running (firefox, google talk, dell utilities,
and two rundll32.exe "Run DLL as an App" progresses.

 

[Gerry]

How much RAM? What CPU speed?

Try Ctrl+Alt+Delete to select Task Manager and click the Performance
Tab. Under Commit Charge what is the Total, the Limit and the Peak?

You should be able to gather more information from Task Manager. With
the Processes tab open select View, Select, Columns and check the boxes
before Peak Memory Usage and Virtual Memory size. What are the figures
for the 6 processes using the largest amounts?

Do you leave the computer on 24/7?

I would be interested in seeing a Disk Defragmenter report. Open Disk
Defragmenter and click on Analyse. Select View Report and
click on Save As and Save. Now find VolumeC.txt in your My Documents
Folder and post a copy. Do this before running Disk Defragmenter as it
is more informative.


--



Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

[me10lee83]

Since posting I decided to remove McAffee since it's a bit of a resource hog
and installed AVG free instead. It immediatly started finding viruses! I also
uninstalled Defender and installed and ran Spybot. Things are working much
better now.

However I'd appreciate you looking at this anyway letting me know if there's
anything I should change to optimize performance.

This is a laptop, so I very rarely actually shut it down, but I have the
power settings set so it goes into hibernate mode after 45 mins.

Here's the answers to your questions:
Commit Charge Total: 576840
Limit: 2219072
Peak: 703752

The 6 processes with the highest peak memory are:
svchhost- 163,168 k
avgrsx-74,312 k
TeaTimer- 59,584 k (part of Spybot?)
explorer- 52,408 k
iexplore- 51,712 k
(this is the 7th but the peak is much higher than current so I was wondering
if that's normal) system- 47,992 k (current is 280 k)

6 highest with VM size is:
teatimer- 40,068
iexplore- 39,344
svchost- 32,984
explorer 31,972
avgrsx-13,600

After cleaning my computer it needs to be defragged, so I'll do that tonight
when I'm done with the computer for the night and post the analysis log
tomorrow.

 

[me10lee83]

Here's the degrag report

Volume System Volume (C
Volume size = 52.80 GB
Cluster size = 4 KB
Used space = 37.68 GB
Free space = 15.12 GB
Percent free space = 28 %

Volume fragmentation
Total fragmentation = 1 %
File fragmentation = 3 %
Free space fragmentation = 0 %

File fragmentation
Total files = 93,247
Average file size = 535 KB
Total fragmented files = 1
Total excess fragments = 4
Average fragments per file = 1.00

Pagefile fragmentation
Pagefile size = 1.31 GB
Total fragments = 5

Folder fragmentation
Total folders = 10,030
Fragmented folders = 1
Excess folder fragments = 0

Master File Table (MFT) fragmentation
Total MFT size = 115 MB
MFT record count = 103,745
Percent MFT in use = 87 %
Total MFT fragments = 3

 

[Gerry]

Given that you have dumped McAfee (good move) and removed malware what
problem do you still have?


~~~~


Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

[me10lee83]

My memory card reader is still not working, which I figued was an issue
totally unrelated to the other problems

I posted the defrag report and task manager numbers anyway b/c I'm curious
if there's a way to improve system performance even though since removing the
malware it has already improved drastically.

Given that you have dumped McAfee (good move) and removed malware what
problem do you still have?


~~~~


Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

[Gerry]

You have not answered these questions!

How much RAM? What CPU speed?

Also the you posted a Disk Defragmenter Report after rather than before
running Disk Defragmenter!

Without the knowing the RAM it is not possible to get any idea of how
much use is being made of the pagefile.

The processes using the highest peak mem are failry typicial. The normal
figures you mention for iexplore.exe do seem high. In Task Manager you
can see a number of svchost entries and the one you quote seems high.
However, you would need to use Process Explorer you pin down what is
causing that.

Download Process Explorer.

For further information about Process Explorer see here:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/SystemInformation/ProcessExplorer.mspx

It would be helpful if you could post the Command Line of the svchost
process generating the high memory usage. In Process Explorer place
cursor on Process and select Properties, Image.

Does your memory card reader work in another computer. If not it could
need replacement.


--



Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~