ok, now I'm frikken po'd...advice, anyone?

[Whisper]

Ok, so here's the deal:

I've been having a slowdown problem for the past month and a half or so (nothing odd before that time). Whenever my computer does anything harddrive-intensive such as decompressing a zip or mp3 file, it seems to slow down quite a bit immediately following the decompression. The system also slows down when opening programs (especially IE), and when switching between webpages in IE. The symptoms of the slowdown are that the moust cursor's movement becomes very irratic rather than smooth (which is strange, considering -as I said- that it hadn't ever happened before a month and a half ago) and the system in general responds slowly.

At first I thought the problem may have been the software, so I formatted and reinstalled...no dice. Formatted again, this time with a repartitioning...nothing. Then I began thinking it was hardware related, so I switched out the motherboard (MSI K7T Pro2a) with a new one I had (DFI)...nothing changed. I then unplugged everything in the computer save the video card and one out of my three sticks of memory...still slowed down. switched out the memory using all three sticks one at a time, still slowed down. Switched out the video card (Creative Labs GF2 GTS) with a spare that works fine in another system of mine (Guillemot TNT2 Ultra), and the thing still slowed down. So by this time I'm thinking that it has to be the harddrive (IBM Deskstar 60GXP 40gb). I switch it out with a spare drive that worked before I got the new one (Western Digital Expert 27gb), and THE FARGEN THING STILL SLOWED DOWN. So now I'm at a loss...the only thing that I haven't switched out is the processor, though I'm not sure if that'd be causing problems such as these. Does anyone have ANY advice as to what could be causing this weird slowdown? Thanks in advance...

 

[GregMal]

Have you tried a new/more powerful power supply???
Greg

 

[Whisper]

No, not yet...but the current is both AMD certified and plenty powerful (350W, if I recall correctly...too lazy to look at the moment, heh). It's less than a year old, and while it could be the problem, I'm thinking it's not. I'd think a powersupply problem would cause things to become unstable rather than simply slowdown, no?

 

[Bluto]

Maybe this sounds too basic, but have you tried putting a performance monitor window up during all your activities?

Performave monitor is in start\programs\accessories\system tools I believe. You can add certain parameters to it to 'monitor' such as what the kernal is doing, memory allocations, threads, handles and so on. It has tons of things in it to view. This MAY give you some kind of clue as to what's going on, or where the problem might be. You can place these parameters in graph form and watch them as you open, run or close your applications.

You've done alot of work already and from the sounds of it you've managed to eliminate alot of the potential hardware culprits. I would look closely at the memory allocation and see if anything looks fishy there. Maybe even task manager (Taskmgr.exe) can give you a clue as to where your resources are going. You've verified that the sticks (RAM) are ok, but if the memory isn't allocated properly it's just as bad.

Have you messed with the registry at all in conjunction with this issue? Have you loaded or deleted any software? Have you tried booting into safe mode and playing with it there?

Just throwing ideas at you. That's all I can think of right now. 😱

Hope it was some kind of help.

Happy holidays....

Bluto

 

[Whisper]

Memory allocation seems to be alright...looks like a steady 292+mb with no fluctuation. I tried looking at disk cache misses, and with each page refresh and program opening there seems to be a spike. Processor kernal usage also jumps to around 100%, but I'm thinking that might be normal..? Anything else I should look at while I"m in here?

 

[Whisper]

*slaps self on forehead*

Ok, it seems that having disabled my sneaky antivirus software (was so used to having the icon there that I forgot to even bother messing with it) has hopefully gotten rid of the slowdown associated with internet webpages...I'll see if it makes a difference with anything else as well. Bah @ stupidity, says I.

The only thing I'm thinking is that the slowdown also seemed to occur right after I had reinstalled windows/before installing the AV software, so I don't believe this will fix it all.

Edit: and my other reservation...as stated in the first post, this slowdown only began happening about a month and a half ago. Before that, the AV software would run full-time with no slowdown noted. Maybe this is just indicative of something beginning to fail...?

 

[Bluto]

I can't think of anything specific to look at other than the general memory resources. If all looks to be normal....and if you have access to another computer you can look at the resources on it and compare of you're uncertain, then maybe there isn't anything amiss.

Certainly AV software scans will slow your system, but shouldn't be that severe. Perhaps log onto the mnfgr's site and see if there's any FAQ's regarding this problem.

Other than this, unless you want to pour over Microsoft's website for a possible solution I can't think of anything else that might help.

Do you have any 'tasks' that might be running that you've forgotten about? Look at Task Scheduler located in My Computer and make sure it isn't running something in the background. Oh...and if you want to make sure nothing is accessing the HD....do a defrag. If ANYTHING moves during a defrag it'll kill the process. You won't know what caused it but you'll know *something* is going on.

bluto