J
JDK
home comp - P4 2.4, 512 ram, ATA133 80GB w/ 8MG buffer.
In the last week or so XP Pro (sp1) will gradually slow down to the
point of being unusable. A cold reboot fixes this temporarily (for maybe
an hour or two), then applications start taking minutes to launch
instead of seconds. Even bringing up a dialog box will drag on to the
point of wondering if your click even registered. It doesn't seem to
matter if the comp is logged into an account or just sitting idle at the
login prompt.
So of course I suspected a hardware problem and just ran SisSandra but
it didn't report anything that it hadn't reported in the past when the
comp was running fine. The CPU is running at 48C (118F). Thats not cool
but doesn't seem excessive, and other than reboots and the occasional
power outage its been running since April when I built it. The board is
at room temperature and the power supply is about 10-12 F. above room
temperature. Now that I find the specs I saved, I see that temperature
wise there is no change since it was built.
A Norton scan quarantined one of the Klez varieties in a downloaded
file saved for future use but of course that didn't help. I haven't
allowed Windows update to install anything for months as the comp was
running fine. I have no idea what could have happened, the only app I
installed was Note Pad Lite that I tested for work and then removed. I
even removed the gPhotoShow screen saver that my wife thinks is just
great but is mostly useless with multiple users on timed logout.
One thing I did notice is that logging off one user and then logging
into a different one appears to prematurely trigger the slow down. I
haven't found a pattern as to which of the three users of one account or
the admin. account on this comp are used after a reboot to trigger the
slowdown, not that it matters, as the slow down will occur at some point
anyway.
The error logs only shows Zone Alarm 'True Vector' errors (Has anyone
found a fix for this yet?), a Ghost startup service error that isn't
enabled on purpose, Mozilla fail to connect errors (I know its buggy but
we have been Netscape users since the time that Netscape was the only
show in town.) and the usual notices of failing to unload the registry
file (still in use) when logging out of or switching users.
We normally leave the machine running 24/7 and shutdowns only occur if
there is a power outage but lately we are cold booting 5-6 times a day
just to get a reasonable response from this P4-2.4! Its not supposed to
be this way!
What could have happened? Surely it isn't time to re-install after only
5 months of XP Pro use? The previous home comp running NT4 took over 3
years before that was even a consideration!
Any ideas are welcome.
Thanks,
John
In the last week or so XP Pro (sp1) will gradually slow down to the
point of being unusable. A cold reboot fixes this temporarily (for maybe
an hour or two), then applications start taking minutes to launch
instead of seconds. Even bringing up a dialog box will drag on to the
point of wondering if your click even registered. It doesn't seem to
matter if the comp is logged into an account or just sitting idle at the
login prompt.
So of course I suspected a hardware problem and just ran SisSandra but
it didn't report anything that it hadn't reported in the past when the
comp was running fine. The CPU is running at 48C (118F). Thats not cool
but doesn't seem excessive, and other than reboots and the occasional
power outage its been running since April when I built it. The board is
at room temperature and the power supply is about 10-12 F. above room
temperature. Now that I find the specs I saved, I see that temperature
wise there is no change since it was built.
A Norton scan quarantined one of the Klez varieties in a downloaded
file saved for future use but of course that didn't help. I haven't
allowed Windows update to install anything for months as the comp was
running fine. I have no idea what could have happened, the only app I
installed was Note Pad Lite that I tested for work and then removed. I
even removed the gPhotoShow screen saver that my wife thinks is just
great but is mostly useless with multiple users on timed logout.
One thing I did notice is that logging off one user and then logging
into a different one appears to prematurely trigger the slow down. I
haven't found a pattern as to which of the three users of one account or
the admin. account on this comp are used after a reboot to trigger the
slowdown, not that it matters, as the slow down will occur at some point
anyway.
The error logs only shows Zone Alarm 'True Vector' errors (Has anyone
found a fix for this yet?), a Ghost startup service error that isn't
enabled on purpose, Mozilla fail to connect errors (I know its buggy but
we have been Netscape users since the time that Netscape was the only
show in town.) and the usual notices of failing to unload the registry
file (still in use) when logging out of or switching users.
We normally leave the machine running 24/7 and shutdowns only occur if
there is a power outage but lately we are cold booting 5-6 times a day
just to get a reasonable response from this P4-2.4! Its not supposed to
be this way!
What could have happened? Surely it isn't time to re-install after only
5 months of XP Pro use? The previous home comp running NT4 took over 3
years before that was even a consideration!
Any ideas are welcome.
Thanks,
John