Help! Very Slow PC

[Nuggs]

Hi All:wavey:

My PC is running seriously slowly at the moment, with it accessing the HDD an awful lot. This results in very slow load times and a slow, jerky mouse pointer at times.

Watching my system activity in Taskmanager - CPU usage tends to peak to 75% every 30 seconds or so, which seems odd.

The system I'm running is:
AMD Athlon 64-bit 3Ghz
Abit KV8 Pro Motherboard
512MB PNY 400Mhz DDR RAM
160Gb Seagate Barracuda SATA HDD
Windows XP Home SP2

I've run Ad-Aware, Spybot S&D, MS Anti-Spyware, Norton Internet Security and Stinger (all updated before scanning), which all returned nil results.

Does anyone have any ideas as to why I might be running so darn slow (or any pointers as to how I might identify the cause?).

All help very gratefully received:thumbup:

[docevi1]

are you running Norton all the time? It's known to be a resource hungry bugger...

Have you defragged, checked for the services that are running such as Auto Update?

Have a look for a program called HiJack This and see what that pulls up - might be something nasty sitting in the background.

[Plotloss]

Could be a memory problem starting to surface or maybe an issue with a sector of the disk that the pagefile is sat on so when it swap stuffs in and out the HDD head is having to retry which eats resources eventually as things get queued up behind it.

Scandisk(Thorough) and Defrag are where I would start (assuming the memory useage of tasks has been checked and is not obviously comical useage from one process) before moving onto removing the memory a stick at a time (if you have more than one) or swapping it for another stick.

[shadytree]

Have you tried opening the window ?

[Nuggs]

Thanks for your very quick responses chaps.

I had consdered the memory point (the PNY stuff is pretty average in any case), and have 2x 512Mb Corsair XMS TwinX on order.

I'll deffo run Defrag and Scandisk when I get home tonight and also have a look for Hijack This.

Thanks again

>> Edited by Nuggs on Wednesday 10th August 11:47

[Lord Elmo]

I have this along with my PC at work. I have a feeling it is the MS anti spyware software. It has slowed since installing this. I intend to uninstall and see if it makes any differance

[malman]

CTRL - ALT - DEL then goto task manager. Check how much memory is used on the performance tab just in case something has a memory leak and is chewing up through the ram and causing the system to page alot

Click on processes then click on the cpu column heading and watch for the process name of the process that spikes up to 75% regularly (should pop to the top). Depending on whats spiking the processor you may need to investigate further.

[Big_M]

Lord Elmo said:

I have this along with my PC at work. I have a feeling it is the MS anti spyware software. It has slowed since installing this. I intend to uninstall and see if it makes any differance

The MS Anti spyware runs constantly while your PC is on and will slow it down. Ad Aware only runs when you ask it to do a scan.

[Nuggs]

Guys - just wanted to say a big thanks for all your advice so far.

Last night I:

• Did a full scan of the HDD (no errors, thank goodness);

• Ran Hijack This - no 'rogue' processes;

• Ran Disk Cleanup;

• Defragmented the HDD; and

• Whacked in the new Corsair XMS memory

The computer's now running waaaaaay better. Not completely perfect just yet, but a HUGE improvement

Thanks again!

[malman]

Nuggs said:

Ran Hijack This - no 'rogue' processes;

So your internet connection is broke as well then

[Nuggs]

malman said:

Nuggs said: Ran Hijack This - no 'rogue' processes; So your internet connection is broke as well then

[Nuggs]

malman said:

Click on processes then click on the cpu column heading and watch for the process name of the process that spikes up to 75% regularly (should pop to the top). Depending on whats spiking the processor you may need to investigate further.

Perfect advice - thanks malman!

Spyware Doctor was beasting my processor. As soon as I uninstalled it (and as I have another 3 anti-spyware programs running, I really don't need it), all was well again.

Thanks mate