Super-slow performance!

[Maury Markowitz]

I'm trying to debug a massive performance problem on a relatively
modern Toshiba laptop (exact model and specs to follow). It's running
fully-up-to-date XP, AVG and little else. MSN is set to start on
login, that's about it.

Starting from _hibernate_ takes about 45 seconds to get to a usable
desktop. The desktop appears, but is unusable for about 30 seconds as
MSN slowly starts. A warm start takes several minutes. Opening Firefox
takes about 20 to 30 seconds. Throughout all of this time, the fan is
whirring away quite loudly. Doing anything that uses a little bit of
CPU, like moving from one page to another in Firefox, causes the fans
to crank up to emergency-flanking-speed. Wait long enough, and even
web browsing will eventually cause the machine to overheat and
shutdown with a thermal protect.

I started with the obvious and blew out the fans and heat sinks with a
can of compressed air. This didn't seem to do anything. The Task
Manager, as always, claims nothing is using any of the CPU other than
Task Manager itself. TM takes about 20 seconds to open. The disk does
not appear to be particularly busy, nor is RAM maxed out.

Ok, so where do I start?

 

[Leonard Grey]

Remove malware.

 

[DL]

And try booting in safe mode, see how it then runs

 

[Patrick Keenan]

I'm trying to debug a massive performance problem on a relatively
modern Toshiba laptop (exact model and specs to follow). It's running
fully-up-to-date XP, AVG and little else. MSN is set to start on
login, that's about it.

Starting from _hibernate_ takes about 45 seconds to get to a usable
desktop. The desktop appears, but is unusable for about 30 seconds as
MSN slowly starts. A warm start takes several minutes. Opening Firefox
takes about 20 to 30 seconds. Throughout all of this time, the fan is
whirring away quite loudly. Doing anything that uses a little bit of
CPU, like moving from one page to another in Firefox, causes the fans
to crank up to emergency-flanking-speed. Wait long enough, and even
web browsing will eventually cause the machine to overheat and
shutdown with a thermal protect.

I started with the obvious and blew out the fans and heat sinks with a
can of compressed air. This didn't seem to do anything. The Task
Manager, as always, claims nothing is using any of the CPU other than
Task Manager itself. TM takes about 20 seconds to open.

Try Process Explorer, instead.

And the system is... ?

 

[Maury Markowitz]

Remove malware.

Virus checker up to date, run periodically, full scanned. AdWare
ditto. Neither reports anything.

I doubt that anything like this could reduce performance to the point
where last night's startup from hibernate took ~4.5 minutes.

Process Explorer

Might find something, but are there "stealth" applications that do not
show up in Task Manager that use up oodles of CPU? Wouldn't their CPU
use show up under another app?

And the system is... ?

Toshiba Satellite with a 3.2 GHz CPU. RAM is low, 447 MB (odd number).
Memory problem?

Maury