Poor performance on new PC

[t1grm]

These are the worst kind of problems to solve. One of those general “my PC’s slow” but no errors or specific scenario you can use to reproduce it.

Basically I have a three month old Samsung X05 with 512 Mb RAM, A 1.3GHz Centrino and 40 Gb HDD running XP Pro running basically office productivity tools and some java thin client applications and it’s running like a dog. Typical problems I am getting are:

5 seconds plus to open up the “all programs” menu from the start menu.

15-20 seconds to open internet explorer.

Upwards of a minute to load all resident programs after logging on upon boot up.

When browsing the “my documents” folder for a different user account to the one you’re logged on as, access times are akin to that of a network drive (even though it’s local).

About 4 times a day it locks up completely for about 30 seconds whilst thrashing the HDD but then normally comes back again.

I get the same problems whether logged onto the company LAN or cable broad band at home.

The things I have noticed different from my old PC are:

I have Norton AV running in the background.

XP Pro has unix style file permissions which I didn’t have in Win 2K Pro. I had to change a lot of these so I could see all the files I want.

It’s constantly thrashing the HDD.

Any ideas what the problem might be?

[docevi1]

It sounds like you have answered your own question - Norton is slowing the boat down.

The other thing is that you may be running a lot of stuff you don't want to. Goto start-run and run "msconfig" and have a look at what is starting up, have a look at the list of process in services.msc (don't change anything too much or you'll feck it up )

[gopher]

You can see which processes are taking up cpu cycles/memory and drive i/o in task manager - select view-->select columns and tick read & write i/o.

If you don't recognise the process causing the stress then google it that will give you a good indication.

Cheers

Paul

edited because everything after a back slash was deleted

>> Edited by gopher on Monday 30th August 12:23

[agent006]

Judgeing by the harddrive activity there's something amiss. Do a disk check with all the options selected (so it does it next bootup). then do a defrag.

[stin hambo]

Don't use MSConfig as it could potentially screw with your system.

Use this site to see what is neccessary and speed up your system. Norton is a hog so I would boot that for a start. There are other faster firewalls and anti virus programs out there...

The link for the site is www.blackviper.com/WinXP/service411.htm

Follow the instructions and your system should work like a dream. PS. I used it on my brand new laptop and the difference is stunning!

[arcturus]

I'd also do a check with AdAware or such like. Some spyware can cause these symptoms.

[goboddog]

adaware slowed mine down i use spybot search and destroy...do a google search and download it...

[t1grm]

Thanks for all the replies folks

I was already using spybot but I re-ran it JIC. I’ve uninstalled Norton and used that web page to disable all the services as per “safe” mode and that seems to have improved things quite a bit.

I’ve also looked at the read/write I/O figures and my top 2 are: Services.exe and mcshield.exe. The latter is McFee which is automatically installed by the corporate network so I can’t disable that. Both are up around 20,000 reads within 5 mins of booting up. Does this seem normal?

[hut49]

I use spybot and Adaware SE personal. This morning ran spybot and picked up over 40 of the critters - collected over the last month. Then ran Adaware Se and it picked up a further 136. So looks like spybot on its own is not adequate.