XP Pro Slowdown

[toxicated101]

XP SP2 Pro

512MB RAM, 1.20 GHX Athon

Can anybody shed some light on this strange problem:

Leaving the PC for a few hours, coming back to it, any tasks (browsers
firefox IE etc) or anything else left running on
the taskbar, become extremely slow to respond and require several
minutes of hard-disk-light activity before the system
becomes responsive again. A test with sysinternals.com's FILEMON
reveals the slow apps are making massive accesses to
PAGEFILE.SYS however there is nothing in Taskmanager to indicate
excessive pagefile use or lack of memory. The task
list has no abnormal CPU usage or memory use or page faults.

For some abnormal reason the system has taken to apparently paging-out
massively during periods of inactivity which
results in huge delays in getting the apps going again when the user
comes back to the system the next day.

Power management settings only switch-off monitor after 20 mins and do
not hibernate or go to switch off hard disks.

 

[Mak]

Are applications that respond slow minimized?
Are they local?
Does it happen if user logs out?
Are there any tasks that run overnight? like AV sweep, defrag, spyware scan?
Task Manager doesn't show page file (paging file) usage, (the label is
wrong) - what is marked in TM as page file usage is commit charge.
Use perfmon to monitor paging file(s), and disk I/Os.
Also, use sysinternals ProcessExplorer to check CPU usage.

 

[cadmium]

XP SP2 Pro

512MB RAM, 1.20 GHX Athon

Can anybody shed some light on this strange problem:

Leaving the PC for a few hours, coming back to it, any tasks
(browsers
firefox IE etc) or anything else left running on
the taskbar, become extremely slow to respond and require
several
minutes of hard-disk-light activity before the system
becomes responsive again. A test with sysinternals.com's
FILEMON
reveals the slow apps are making massive accesses to
PAGEFILE.SYS however there is nothing in Taskmanager to
indicate
excessive pagefile use or lack of memory. The task
list has no abnormal CPU usage or memory use or page faults.

For some abnormal reason the system has taken to apparently
paging-out
massively during periods of inactivity which
results in huge delays in getting the apps going again when
the user
comes back to the system the next day.

Power management settings only switch-off monitor after 20
mins and do
not hibernate or go to switch off hard disks.

Your HD may probably be in need of a defrag, have you done that? Since
you are finding applications very slow in responding, this might be a
cause. I would personally suggest you run any specialized defragmenter
on you system, as its fast and also defrags the MFT and paging file.

 

[Rob graham]

XP SP2 Pro

512MB RAM, 1.20 GHX Athon

Can anybody shed some light on this strange problem:

Leaving the PC for a few hours, coming back to it, any tasks (browsers
firefox IE etc) or anything else left running on
the taskbar, become extremely slow to respond and require several
minutes of hard-disk-light activity before the system
becomes responsive again.

Yes, I've had this problem. It's less now than it used to be but it's still
there to a degree.

Rob Graham