Slow erratic performance, Windows XP.

[FORTRANS]

Hi,

   Had some surgery, and am not allowed to drive.  So I am at
my mother's place and not with my normal selection of computers.

   Her computer is a WinXP desktop, and it mostly runs "okay",
but sometimes it slows way down.  A reboot seems to help then.

   I also brought a laptop with WinXP to do e-mail.  It is usually
running extremely slowly, or freezes up.  But it can boot and run
(sort of) normally.  The last time it did that, I tried "Stand By"
rather than "Turn Off", but after waking up and then ~~15 minutes
of inactivity, it logged me out and shut down on its own.  Sort
of defeats the whole idea?

   For instance, the last two boot-ups seem to have frozen, meaning
more than 5 minutes with any sign of life.  (No cursor, no clock
update, and no keyboard response.  The first after running slowly
until I invoked Task Manager to try and see what was going on.
It locked up shortly after.  The second locked while painting the desktop
or whatever on start-up.

   Trying again just now, It has not died, but is (if not dead) running
a hundred times too slowly.  MSE just complained, as it is wont to
do, so something is alive.  And other signs of life are pretending to
happen, so this time it might not die.  But it's not really usable either.

   Does this bring anything to mind?  As it has recovered to somewhat
normal recently, does that mean anything?  Is there some stupid
(er.. simple) trouble-shooting I can do before going home?

Thanks in advance,

Steve N.

[sinsi]

Hard disk surface scan. I've found that if the freezing is random it's often a failing hard drive, less often faulty RAM.
Look in Event Viewer under System for "disk" or "ntfs" problems.

[dedndave]

i have seen this on older machines
they put 3 or 4 anti-virus programs on there, then wonder why it runs like a pig - lol

get rid of all those "on access" scanners and use an "on demand" type, like malwarebytes
the worst 2 are mcafee and norton
seems like they have a much better sales force than programming team

[dedndave]

by the way.....

if you have norton on there
figure out which version it is
go to their website and download the appropriate version of "Norton Removal Tool" (my all-time favorite program)
use the tool to get a proper removal

if you remove it with the control panel snap-in, then have to figure out which version it was, it can be a little tricky

[FORTRANS]

Hi sinsi,

Hard disk surface scan. I've found that if the freezing is random it's often a failing hard drive, less often faulty RAM.
Look in Event Viewer under System for "disk" or "ntfs" problems.

   Okay.  Start => Control Panel => Administrative Tools => Event Viewer.
Three as "disk", two in May, one on the 19th, Event code is 11.  What
is an E100B? never heard of that one.  The majority of events are from
"Service Control Manager"

Hi Dave,

   Killed AVG a while back.  Have been "using" MSE.

by the way.....

if you have norton on there
figure out which version it is
go to their website and download the appropriate version of "Norton Removal Tool" (my all-time favorite program)
use the tool to get a proper removal

if you remove it with the control panel snap-in, then have to figure out which version it was, it can be a little tricky

   Yeah, my Windows 2000 system was/is cursed with Norton AV.
It (NAV) stopped working for a few (or more) years, so I tried to
remove it.  I got a removal tool from Norton/Symantec, and it did
something.  It did remove most of the installation, leaving enough
to prevent installing NAV and giving an error pop-up every time I
run a 16-bit program.

Regards,

Steve N.

[Magnum]

Hi,

   Had some surgery, and am not allowed to drive.  So I am at
my mother's place and not with my normal selection of computers.

   Her computer is a WinXP desktop, and it mostly runs "okay",
but sometimes it slows way down.  A reboot seems to help then.

Code Select Expand

How much RAM does it have ?

   I also brought a laptop with WinXP to do e-mail.  It is usually
running extremely slowly, or freezes up.  But it can boot and run
(sort of) normally.  The last time it did that, I tried "Stand By"
rather than "Turn Off", but after waking up and then ~~15 minutes
of inactivity, it logged me out and shut down on its own.  Sort
of defeats the whole idea?

Code Select Expand

Was it running slowly before you brought it there ?

   For instance, the last two boot-ups seem to have frozen, meaning
more than 5 minutes with any sign of life.  (No cursor, no clock
update, and no keyboard response.  The first after running slowly
until I invoked Task Manager to try and see what was going on.
It locked up shortly after.  The second locked while painting the desktop
or whatever on start-up.

   Trying again just now, It has not died, but is (if not dead) running
a hundred times too slowly.  MSE just complained, as it is wont to
do, so something is alive.  And other signs of life are pretending to
happen, so this time it might not die.  But it's not really usable either.

   Does this bring anything to mind?  As it has recovered to somewhat
normal recently, does that mean anything?  Is there some stupid
(er.. simple) trouble-shooting I can do before going home?

Thanks in advance,

Steve N.

[MichaelW]

Running on a multi-core system you hardly know that MSE is there, but running on a single core system it can be a CPU hog, to the point that my Windows XP P3 system will pretty much stop responding, sometimes for 5 minutes or more. MSE can be configured to restrict it's CPU usage for scheduled scans, but for other activities,  updating its definitions for example, it "owns" the system.

[FORTRANS]

Hi,

How much RAM does it have ?

   256 Meg, I believe.

Was it running slowly before you brought it there ?

   Yes, sometimes.  The problem was that I was not at home due to
the surgery and did not have an alternative system to use.  That
aggravated things and I wanted to fix things up a bit.  I am back home
now, so it is again a fairly low priority, all other things under consideration.

Running on a multi-core system you hardly know that MSE is there, but running on a single core system it can be a CPU hog, to the point that my Windows XP P3 system will pretty much stop responding, sometimes for 5 minutes or more. MSE can be configured to restrict it's CPU usage for scheduled scans, but for other activities,  updating its definitions for example, it "owns" the system.

   Well the Task Manager shows moderate CPU and memory usage.
Though it can be more than five minutes between when it updates
its display.  I got rid of AVG for MSE to try to speed things up.  If it
does not completely lock up on booting it can recover to a "normal"
state in about an hour or two.  (Or not.)  I have/had disabled the
real time protection, which did not change this problem.

   The fact that it can boot up "mostly normal", "mostly playing dead",
then usually recovering, or completely locked up, makes things hard
(and very, very slow) to see what is going on.

   Thanks for your help.  Any follow up is welcome.

Regards,

Steve N.

[TouEnMasm]

With so few memory (XP need at least 1 Go) you can follow this way to optimize xp without warranty of
results,that is:
-let only the anti-virus at start (msconfig)
- verify the free memory in the task manager,must be really low
-use bootvis
-use "COMPACT /U /S /A /I /F C:\*.*" to invalid the files compression.
apply others xp optimizes (defrag...)

[jj2007]

Low RAM could be an issue. Normal behaviour on WinXP SP3 with 2 GB RAM is as shown below - sorted by CPU time.

[GoneFishing]

...

[FORTRANS]

With so few memory (XP need at least 1 Go) you can follow this way to optimize xp without warranty of
results,that is:
-let only the anti-virus at start (msconfig)
- verify the free memory in the task manager,must be really low
-use bootvis
-use "COMPACT /U /S /A /I /F C:\*.*" to invalid the files compression.
apply others xp optimizes (defrag...)

Thanks,

   MSConfig?  Had not thought of that.  As far as memory in Task
Manager, see above.  Does not seem out of line for a 256M system.

   I had not heard of Bootvis.  That does look interesting.

Low RAM could be an issue. Normal behaviour on WinXP SP3 with 2 GB RAM is as shown below - sorted by CPU time.

Hi,

   Well, not much to work with here (as far as I can see).  XP does
what it wants to with the 256M.

I have an older pc with Celeron 1GHz , 128Mb RAM and  Windows XP. It's not superfast but I get used to it . I have no antivirus, I disabled all unwanted services and run only lightweight applications which eat not so much system memory .

Hi,

   Well I still have MSE, but it should be turned off, mostly.  I have
turned off some services, but I am a bit reluctant to change things
that I have no real idea what they do.

Are BIOS Hardware Monitor values in their normal range ?

   The computer is a Sony Vaio U101.  Quoting a Linux how-to
page:

BIOS setup utility is pretty free of options. You can: set the time and
date, turn off LCD screen expansion, toggle network and firewire booting,
disable the graphical Vaio boot animation, change the speaker volume,
set a BIOS passwords, and change boot device order. And that's it.

    Neat?  Sony must have wanted to limit problems with end users.
Anyway, it packs up nicely and is thus easy to schlep around when
one is a bit limited in movement.

Regards,

Steve N.

[dedndave]

disk space can also be an issue

[MichaelW]

And the size/location/settings for your swap file.

[TouEnMasm]

Perhaps also a change of system,for example Lubuntu (linux) could be useful.
Lubuntu use only 120 Mo of ram and can do many things.