All operations sloooow! Dont know what else to ck. >???<

[Hyperlite26]

Hi. I have ran into a brick wall in trying to fix a friends computer at his business. First off it's a Gateway P4 2 GHZ, PC2100 DDR 128MB of RAM, 64MB Video Wix XP Home Ed w\ Service pack 1.

The problem is that the computer has become slow when double clicking\ opening programs, loading IE, performing picture up & downloads; but it's sporadic in this behaivor. Some time it seems to perform as it should but most times it creeps along in performing the task.

I have checked everything I know to check and it says everything is in A-1 condition but the when you use the computer you know otherwise. Here is what I have ck'd & done to troubleshoot the problem.

It has Norton Antivirus installed & it was up to date. I ran a complete system ck & it was clean. I read about a bug in a Norton AutoUpdate that they had where people reported a delay in their system when they right clk'd an icon & it would take 4 or 5 seconds to bring up the menu. They said to correct this problem just run another "Live Update" to Norton and it would fix it. I did so but that didnt fix it.

I decided to do a second Virus ck and went to pcpitstop.com and do a scan. I did a quick scan and a full scan just last night. Again, clean w\ no viruses. I also did a performance test while I was there and everything ck'd out fine.

I ran Cwshredder, Hijackthis, Adaware and Spybot on the machine. Cwshredder came up clean. Hijackthis came up w\ like 2 items that I deleted. Adaware came up w\ a couple and Spybot came up w\ some insignificant cookies and what not... I cleaned all those as they found them. Still it didnt help the performance.

As noted the computer came w\ 128MB PC2100 DDR RAM. After all the other test came up clean I suggested we try another stick of RAM in it to see if it was the culprit. I installed a new stick of Micron PC2100 DDR 128MB of RAM and left the old stick out, rebooted the machine and still the same thing. I knew it wasnt the RAM so I went ahd and put the original stick of RAM in the other slot which gives him 256MB now. It's not the RAM because it runs the same w\ either single sticks in or both sticks in(which should really boost performance a bit since it is now running at DDR where as before it was not.)

Gateway had installed some kind of PC Doctor software on the machine at the factory so I ran a test on the processor, RAM (just for thoi) motherboard and the program said they all tested fine.

I thought it may be a heat issue so I took the side cover off and had a 12" circular fan blowing on it...it wasn't a heat issue.

So..... I'm out of ideas and Im stuck!

If anyone can shed some light on this or have ran into a similar problem can you tell me how you remedied the situation? I would appreciate any and all advice.

Thanks!!!

 

[monzie]

128mb of RAM is really pushing it for xp....256 minimum for stable results (yes i know it will run on 128.......for very light work). Anyway do a CAD and see whats using your cpu cycles on the Processes tab (anything getting near 100%)?.

Now go to the Performance tab, is the Page File being used? Do you have any Physical Memory free and if so how much?

Have you defragged the the HD complete with the PageFile/VirtualMemory recently?

Is xp's services configured to kill uneeded procesess?

 

[Abhi]

Turning of system restore, visual elements, and remote access... normally speeds the comp up... a LOT.

You might not want to turn on system restore again later though.....

See http://www.blackviper.com for XP tweaks

 

[Hyperlite26]

Hi, I need to make one correction. I said he has 128MB sticks but they were 256MB sticks...so he now has 512MB and originally was running 256MB. Nonetheless, even at 256MB his computer was running fine, running the same programs he always ran, then one day it slowed up he said and that was w\ 256MB. So something else had to happen.

I did ck the cpu resources & it's not using any of the cpu...it was at 1 & 2 % and the computer has 95% of resources free. The page file was set to 384MB but I have not defragged the HD.

He doesnt download stuff from the net or install new programs. The only thing he does is transfer pics to put up on Ebay for his business and ck email and surf, but no dl's like music, files, etc.

Thanks for the tips and advice though.

I will ck the visual elements and remote access deal too Abhi.

If anyone else has some suggestions I'll sure give them a shot too.

Thanks!

 

[Slikkster]

Download Mike Lin's Startup Control Panel and install it. It will put an icon in control panel labeled "Startup" that lets you see exactly what's loading/running at bootup, and gives you the ability to disable those you don't want running.

Startup Control Panel (zipped)

Check a couple of other things, too. See if any FTP sites show up in the My Computer list of drives. Delete them if they do. See if any FTP sites show up in the "typed URL" list of Internet Explorer, or if any local hard drive paths show up there.

You can also try recreating the xp pagefile:

Click Start.
Right-click My Computer.
Click Properties.
On the Advanced tab, in the Performance section, click Settings.
In the Virtual Memory section, click Change.
For Paging file size for selected drive, click No Paging File and then click Set.
Click Yes after the following warning appears:
If the paging file on volume X: has an initial size of less than xx megabytes, then the system may not be able to create a debugging information file if a STOP error occurs. Continue anyway?

(X is the drive letter and xx is the amount of RAM installed on your computer minus 1 megabyte.)

Click System Managed Size.
Click OK four times, and then restart the computer when you are prompted.

 

[ITJunkie]

Find out if he did a "patch" or Windows Update shortly before everything slowed down. Sometimes the MS patch seems to slow things down. If he did, uninstall the patch and see if that solves the problem. This has been an issue for me at times.