Twokinds ARCHIVE Forums

Ok ladies and gents, here's the problem: lately, my computer's been running like [censored], with it experiencing prolonged and frequently sporadic slowdown that cripples it completely. It's all I can do to get this posted, because it's repeatedly hanging up for up to a minute at a time. The CPU's constantly running at 100% anymore as well.

I've been putting it through a barrage of tests to no avail. Spybot: Search and Destroy, Spy Sweeper, Ad-Aware, Norton, and AVG have found only a few things and removed them, and none of them have stopped this, and its getting worse and worse. What can I do? Any and all help will be greatly appreciated.

Well, I don't know if that can help, but when you notice that your pc lags, do Ctrl+Alt+Del and go in the processus place (sorry, my XP is in french so I don't know the correct traduction) and check in the Processor column, which program have the highest number. If it's as I think, one program should make your whole PC lags. The number should be around 80-90 (it's in the % of the juice of the computer that program takes). Then, you will have which program makes you lags. Hope it will help :?

If it isn't spyware or viruses, or having too many programs running at once, it's likely just a case of computer aging. You may have parts that are just breaking down. I would hurry your fuzzy butt up and buy your new rig, rather than spend another couple hundred on fixing this dying one.

It's not too many programs, and this is my laptop, which I bought new almost one year ago, so it shouldn't be aging. It's running a dual-core AMD Turion 64 and has 2 gigs of ram, and has almost always been very fast. So I dunno what's causing it. Maybe av might know?

I should also mention that my hard drive seems to be constantly being read or recorded to, as I can hear it, and the activity light seems to always be flickering anymore.

Sounds a bit out of my range, yeah. I'd say if you're not running it any differently than you were when it worked fine, and Ad-Aware didn't come up with anything, then the problem's more tricky than I'd figured.

Reformat the HDD as a last resort, I'd say. Or check for dust that might be clogging intakes/outtakes and overheating parts.

Are you using Vista or XP? My dad had some problems a while back with Vista locking up his HDD.

I'd hope he had XP with only 2 gigs of RAM...

Do what Frostflame suggested. Ctrl-Alt-Del. Click the "Processes" tab, and then click the table heading "CPU" twice. That'll sort the list by CPU usage. I have problems on my laptop computer with AdobeUpdater binding my CPU, so it's possible that you're looking at a "good" program that's just sort of lost its mind. The other possibility is a bit of malware that the scanners failed to pick up or cannot remove. That does happen (happened to me a couple weeks back). What are the top three "Image Name"'s and their CPU and memory usage numbers? That ought to tell us a lot.

I don't know why exactly, but if you use IE for too long (opening more windows and such, talking about version 7), the memory it takes just keeps on adding. ¬.¬ Well, it does that to me. So if you have IE 7. Just close it from time to time

Firefox 2 too did that too, it was because of a memory leak. Don't know if it's still present in 3 or not.

You may have a dying HDD!

Reboot and enter the BIOS utilities. It should contain a HDD-test.
Run it.

I wouldn't be surprised if it detects bad sectors where th swap file is located...

I hear defragmenting hard disk (not sure if that's the correct translation) can speed up laptops dramatically, too. Worked with a relative of mine.

Defragging may help a bit, but not when the machines sounds as bad a that...

Even if the drive is badly fragmented I really wouldn't expect more than a 10% increase in performance.

I've sen the same symptoms on numerous laptops at the office, and it's almost always one or more bad sectors in an area where Windows doesn't expect it to be... (Seems that Windows doesn't know how to handle a bad sector in the swap file... )

One 'easy' test that can be done is if the machine has a lot of RAM. Then you can switch off the use of a swap file entirely. If Windows then seems to run faster or at least doesn't 'terrorize' the HDD more, you know that the drive is a goner.)

Task Manager, TeaTimer, Firefox, and Explorer are usually the top 3, but they jump up and down so quickly that it's hard to get a really accurate judge of which uses the most. Firefox usually has 3-6 on the CPU, as does Task Manager. TeaTimer usually only has 1-2, and Explorer is likewise. Memory usage... Firefox is at 94,908k, Task Manager is at 2,432k, TeaTimer is at 42,51k, and Explorer is at 18,000k.

I use Firefox 3, so that's not it.

Vista Home Premium. It's been fine 'til just recently.

I'll give this a test in the morning. Thanks for the suggestion.

Any luck with your HD scans? Anthony might be on to something, as your CPU/Memory numbers look okay (though I don't have a clue what TeaTimer is). Better'n mine, anyway (thanks to Pandora, it's rare for me to have less than 120 MB tied into Firefox or IE at any given time). You shouldn't be using up all your RAM unless you've got a lot more things going at once than I think you do, so it looks like it's something more complicated than a simple program going awry.