Windows XP very slow

[Guest]

Hi,

I've finally gotten around to upgrading(?) my trusty Win 2000 box to Win XP
Pro SP2 (upgraded to Win XP with SP1, then installed SP2).

The system was incredibly slow while it was briefly running SP1, but I
pressed on with the SP2 install in the hope that things would improve. They
haven't. I've never seen such a slow Windows install: I can make a cup of
coffee while it's painting a window!

Observing what's occurring in the Task Manager, I see that various processes
are clattering away using significant amounts of CPU, even when nothing is
happening. The worst offender is explorer.exe, but various others are each
consistently gobbling a few percent of the CPU i.e. taskmgr.exe,
services.exe, svchost.exe, System, lsass.exe. Between them, these processes
are consistently using 10% - 40% CPU even when no applications are running
and I'm just sitting there watching the Task Manager.

Why are these processes stealing about a third of my CPU cycles when nothing
is happening? All suggestions gratefully received.

BTW, it's an Athlon XP 2500+ CPU, with 512Mb RAM and loads of free disk
space. Not exactly state of the art, but should still be well capable of
running XP Pro.

 

[Poprivet]

Hi,

I've finally gotten around to upgrading(?) my trusty Win 2000 box to
Win XP Pro SP2 (upgraded to Win XP with SP1, then installed SP2).

The system was incredibly slow while it was briefly running SP1, but I
pressed on with the SP2 install in the hope that things would
improve. They haven't. I've never seen such a slow Windows install:
I can make a cup of coffee while it's painting a window!

Observing what's occurring in the Task Manager, I see that various
processes are clattering away using significant amounts of CPU, even
when nothing is happening. The worst offender is explorer.exe, but
various others are each consistently gobbling a few percent of the
CPU i.e. taskmgr.exe, services.exe, svchost.exe, System, lsass.exe.
Between them, these processes are consistently using 10% - 40% CPU
even when no applications are running and I'm just sitting there
watching the Task Manager.

Why are these processes stealing about a third of my CPU cycles when
nothing is happening? All suggestions gratefully received.

BTW, it's an Athlon XP 2500+ CPU, with 512Mb RAM and loads of free
disk space. Not exactly state of the art, but should still be well
capable of running XP Pro.

How many times have you Restarted since the install completed? Windows does
sort of an "optimization" each time it starts and 3 consecutive Restarts
seems to be enough to get most things sorted out. I usually make it 4 just
for good measure, and it really does make a difference.
Also, run the Disk Cleanup util and run defrag on the drive.
It wouldn't hurt to run chkdsk either while you have the system in a
mostly virgin state.

HTH

Pop`

 

[Lem]

Hi,

I've finally gotten around to upgrading(?) my trusty Win 2000 box to Win XP
Pro SP2 (upgraded to Win XP with SP1, then installed SP2).

The system was incredibly slow while it was briefly running SP1, but I
pressed on with the SP2 install in the hope that things would improve. They
haven't. I've never seen such a slow Windows install: I can make a cup of
coffee while it's painting a window!

Observing what's occurring in the Task Manager, I see that various processes
are clattering away using significant amounts of CPU, even when nothing is
happening. The worst offender is explorer.exe, but various others are each
consistently gobbling a few percent of the CPU i.e. taskmgr.exe,
services.exe, svchost.exe, System, lsass.exe. Between them, these processes
are consistently using 10% - 40% CPU even when no applications are running
and I'm just sitting there watching the Task Manager.

Why are these processes stealing about a third of my CPU cycles when nothing
is happening? All suggestions gratefully received.

BTW, it's an Athlon XP 2500+ CPU, with 512Mb RAM and loads of free disk
space. Not exactly state of the art, but should still be well capable of
running XP Pro.

Make sure that the "Indexing Service" is not running. On the
"Properties" page for each hard drive, UNcheck the box to "Allow
Indexing service to index the disk ..."

While you're at it, you might also reduce the size allocated to System
Restore (although this shouldn't have much to do with speed). Open the
System Properties dialog, click on the System Restore tab, select the
disk (partition) on which Windows is installed, and click the "Settings"
button. Move the slider to change the amount of space allocated. By
default, SR is set to use 12% of the partition. On modern large hard
drives, this is far too much. Adjust to use approx. 1 GB. Also,
because System Restore only tracks and restores "system" information,
there isn't any point in running SR on non-system partitions. Much more
detail on System Restore and MVP Bert Kinney's site: http://bertk.mvps.org/

 

[Guest]

Hi,

I've finally gotten around to upgrading(?) my trusty Win 2000 box to Win XP
Pro SP2 (upgraded to Win XP with SP1, then installed SP2).

The system was incredibly slow while it was briefly running SP1, but I
pressed on with the SP2 install in the hope that things would improve. They
haven't. I've never seen such a slow Windows install: I can make a cup of
coffee while it's painting a window!

Observing what's occurring in the Task Manager, I see that various processes
are clattering away using significant amounts of CPU, even when nothing is
happening. The worst offender is explorer.exe, but various others are each
consistently gobbling a few percent of the CPU i.e. taskmgr.exe,
services.exe, svchost.exe, System, lsass.exe. Between them, these processes
are consistently using 10% - 40% CPU even when no applications are running
and I'm just sitting there watching the Task Manager.

Why are these processes stealing about a third of my CPU cycles when nothing
is happening? All suggestions gratefully received.

BTW, it's an Athlon XP 2500+ CPU, with 512Mb RAM and loads of free disk
space. Not exactly state of the art, but should still be well capable of
running XP Pro.

Thank you both for your replies. I've learned some things. Unfortunately,
I still haven't fixed this dismal upgrade. I'm now backing up all my data
(verrry sloooowly), then I'm gonna scrape this heap of junk back to the bare
disk and start all over. Shoulda done this in the first place instead of
following the Win XP installer's recommendation to upgrade. Will I never
learn? When Microsoft recommends something, do the opposite...

Thanks again

Baz

Thanks again.