MS XP Pro 2002 SP2

[ssemrau]

I'm at my wits end here with what might be the problem - let me give some background on things and maybe someone will have an idea.

This is a 'work' laptop (Dell Latitude D810). A couple of weeks ago my company pushed out the MS Office 2003 SP3 which required a reboot of my system. After putting off the reboot for about 10 hours the system forced a reboot on me.

After the reboot I noticed that the system was taking a long time trying to load up applications and opening up the task manager revealed hfnetchk.exe was taking up the CPU usage. This took an enormous amount of time to run. Once it was finally done (0% usage) I rebooted the system again.

This work laptop has Symantec AV running (not my choice) ... whenever I reboot the RTVScan and DoScan executables run and normally only take a minute or two to complete - now they are taking upwards of 10 minutes.

For the next two weeks I did nothing to the computer and continued to do my work on it but noticed that it was taking longer and longer for applications to open and respond. Watching the Task Manager I would notice that the System Idle Process, that normally stays in the 90% range was now ranging anywhere from 0% to 85% and other processes that normally may show 1% were increased. CPU Usage constantly shows(ed) 100%. If I did nothing with the computer after boot and login CPU Usage will (would) eventually go down to 20% but even movement of the mouse would spike usage up to 100%.

Now I know instantiating a program / browser or what have you will momentarily spike up the usage, even to 100% but not keep it there.

I have tried:

[*]doing a System Restore prior to the install date
[*]running a Scan Disk on boot (all fine)
[*]running a Defrag (all fine MFT shows 3 but size is fine)
[*]running the latest version of CCleaner and cleaning up standard items
[*]running the latest version of Spybot S&D - only found DoubleClick Ad
[*]running FULL Symantec AV scan (latest Def) - nothing found
[*]running SFC - no issues
[*]running HiJackThis - everything listed is recognizable
[*]running Windows Defender
[*]running SysInternals tools to try and identify an issue

Unfortunately I'm unable to uninstall the SP3 via Add/Remove programs (it's not an option).

Does anyone have any idea of what might be causing my system to become so slow?

 

[mechBgon]

1) look at the Event Viewer and see if there's anything there to give you insights on what the issue is

2) check whether your hard disk controllers have slipped into PIO mode, which can put the brakes on any system pretty badly. In Device Manager, you want to look at the Advanced tab on the properties panels of controllers listed under the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers heading. If any of them are in PIO mode, do an Uninstall of that controller, then reboot so Windows can rediscover it and forget that it had problems.

 

[ssemrau]

mechBgon - thank you for replying.

I don't see anything out of sorts with either the Event or System log.

I checked HD controllers and they are not in PIO mode.

Some additional notes on this:

Because it seemed as though MS Office 2003 SP3 was pushed to this laptop by my company just before this happened;

I have subsequently un-installed MS Office completely.

I also un-installed MSIE 7 and reverted back to MSIE 6.

I do have Firefox on this laptop as well and although it is 'slightly' faster it's negligible.

Another thing I noticed was that the system was 'hanging' for a long time on restart/shutdown at the 'Saving your settings....' screen.

I did some research on that and found the CPHClean tool from MS. This did resolve the 'hanging' issue and subsequently now shuts down with blazing speed.

With the un-installation of MS Office and reverting to MSIE6 I have noticed the System Idle process usage increasing again or in other words showing a CPU Usage total of 10% when idle. This is a great sign, however when opening any type of application or even the browser - the amount of time taken to actually render the application or contents of the browser is still enormous compared to what it was just 3 weeks ago.

 

[RebateMonger]

At this point, it might be cheaper and faster to just re-install the OS and applications. At least it's a guaranteed fix. There's probably a Recovery Partition on the hard drive that could speed this up, assuming that the current OS is the same that the laptop originally came with.

 

[JACKDRUID]

disable norton antivirus is the ONLY way to go. rtvscan lags big time on almost ANY software/hardware changes... uninstall it and it'll be all good again.

yes symantec should be shot

use free antivirus such as avast, grisoft, antivir