Horrid system performance

[Rock Hydra]

In recent weeks my system's performance has declined severely and I cannot figure out why.
The problem is generally high CPU usage, long boot times, and excessive hard drive access even when it's "idle" with just the desktop showing.

I've run virus scans, spyware scans, and even looked up every process that I had running online to see what could be possibly causing the problem and it hasn't turned up anything. I'm stumped...does anyone have any ideas?


My system specs:
Dell Lattitude 110L
Pentium M 1.7GHz
512 MB RAM
40GB Hard drive
Win XP Pro.

Reformatting is out of the question due to the fact my CD drive is f'ed up.

 

[Chadder007]

Spyware / Virus is still possible
What scanners have you used? You may need to download something else to scan and also run the programs in Safe Mode.

 

[Rock Hydra]

Originally posted by: Chadder007
Spyware / Virus is still possible
What scanners have you used? You may need to download something else to scan and also run the programs in Safe Mode.

I've used AVG, Spybot and AdAware to scan.

 

[Auric]

How aboot a screenshot of processes and startup items (msconfig or ccleaner)?

 

[Rock Hydra]

Okay.

Startup 1
Startup 2
Processes

 

[Auric]

Ooh, stylish grayscale

The reason I suggested ccleaner as an alt. to msconfig is precisely because all items can be viewed sans scrolling... and sorting processes by image name would be easier... also one image file would have been easier to refer to.

Are those the processes after startup or with other schtuff run manually afterwards (other than firefox, presumably)? Commit charge isn't particularly high.

Anyhoo, I'll jump in with those I recognize and perhaps others can do the same:

What's the blank startup item?
Is QT tray needed? Prolly not.
Is Java updater needed? Ditto prolly not.
AVG looks pretty bloaty.

In general, I would recommend disabling anything automatic that does not definitively make it easier on you (versus potential reduction in performance). Have you disabled unnecessary services? Some of those can be killers regardless of memory useage -particularly the indexing service, for one (google xp services guide).

Total defrag, registry clean and compact may reduce some of the symptoms. AFAIK, CPU usage is transparent -I mean, any usage should be listed in TM so any culprit should be easily spotted.

 

[Rock Hydra]

Alright, I'll try some of these. I have defagged and removed all the unnecessary files a couple days ago and it didn't seem to help.

 

[Skeeedunt]

Hard drive could be dying slowly. See if you can run some Dell diagnostics, though they probably won't tell you anything (my D600 HD died a slow clicking death, but diagnostics came back fine.)

 

[imported_goku]

The problem is the fact you own a dell. I wouldn't be surprised if you system was thermal throttling or experiencing a hardware failure somewhere. When you say high CPU usage, what is eating up the cpu cycles?

 

[Rock Hydra]

Originally posted by: goku
The problem is the fact you own a dell. I wouldn't be surprised if you system was thermal throttling or experiencing a hardware failure somewhere. When you say high CPU usage, what is eating up the cpu cycles?

That's ultimately the question. I can't figure out what is killing performance. I wish I could afford a different chassis, cause Dell locked the video memory at 8 MB.

 

[imported_goku]

Oh, forgot to mention this. Run sisoft sandra memory bandwidth benchmark and report back.

 

[movingincircles]

set your power options to ALWAYS ON
so speedstep won't clock down the cpu to save battery life



PLUS, download NOD32
http://www.eset.com/download/index.php
free 30-day trial

I HIGHLY recommend this antivirus

before I had a kaspersky antivirus software, ran a FULL DEPTH scan, no viruses
installed NOD32 RIGHT AFTER, and found a couple of keyloggers and other trojans that had been hiding in my comp the whole time

and you might want to research if any rootkit viruses are there (though, NOD32 should take care of that as well)