Sudden errors in Win XP

[Eteq]

This is more a general question than for a specific computer - I frequently need to troubleshoot a wide variety of computers that aren't working properly, and sometimes I run into computers that have experienced a sudden slowdown in performance for no immediately obvious reason (sometimes there'll be a seemingly unrelated cause, like Word spontaneously crashing). I'd like the opinion of some of y'all on what steps you'd take to try to troubleshoot these problems (beyond the obvious i.e. no "check free hard drive space" or "defrag the system drive").

 

[Willoughbyva]

Has there been any new hardware or software added to the computer?

 

[redbeard1]

If they have control of their machine, and have internet access, invariably it ends up being all the spyware, adware, toolbars and the like. I ran across one customer that you couldn't use her computer because it was so jerky. Uninstalled incredimail and her bandwith and computer returned to normal. She had less pop ads too! Go figure.

 

[Green Man]

CPU time from task manager processes. To see what process is hogging CPU time
page faults/sec, pages/sec, %processor time _total from permon to see if CPU time is spent paging

If page faults/sec is high, how is available physical memory from task manager performance and does mem usage from task manager processes correspond to CPU time? If so, find out what app or service is using that process, and stop it. If that helps, is it normal for that app or service to hog resources? can you do without it? can you give it a lower priority? Is there other software that uses less resources? Is the app broke?
Check event viewer applications for warning or stop errors.
If something isn't configured right, networking errors can cause a huge slowdown.
Run through device manager. Is DMA enabled on Hard drives and CDs that support it?
Can you move the swap file off the System Disk?
Is the registry bloated?
Can unused .DLL files be cleaned up?
Are there unused services that can be stopped?

hmmm...that should get you started

 

[Eteq]

Is the registry bloated?
Can unused .DLL files be cleaned up?
Are there unused services that can be stopped?

These may be a problem - I'm guessing there's decent software to automate this - any recommendations?


Although, most of these are problems that gradually get worse - I'm talking about a sudden change that was caused at most by an application crash... Sometimes it's a hardware issue, but what are some software possibilities?

 

[Green Man]

I've used ashampoo and webroot window washer for cleaning up registry dead links and unneeded .DLLs
both are easy to use and seem to work well. Best of all, both have free trial versions.
I don't know of any automated way to stop unused services. There is a tweak guide here. I've been meaning to go through it, but I haven't yet...so I can't really guarantee it.