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System is bogged down

Sonikku

Sonikku

Lifer
For some reason everything is taking longer and longer to load. It had nothing to do with bandwidth or internet, even opening "My Computer" or doing a search for a program seems to bring up the spinning blue circle where it "thinks about it" for half a minute before it does something. Other times I'll try opening a program like VLC player and it will appear to do nothing, then open up 5 minutes later. Also in firefox it will stop working and give me a black screen with "not responding" for a few moments before freeing up again. What is going on?

Windows Vista Ultimate
Western Digital 250gb hdd
Intel g630 sandy bridge cpu
Radeon 7770 gpu

Built the machine about a year ago. It's been doing a little of this for some time now, but it's really beginning to bog down to almost unusable levels.

I've run a full scan with updated avast, windows essentials and spy bot. No red flags. I've tried defragging, cleaning everything out with Ccleaner, cleared up a few registry errors. I have about 50gb free atm. Still no change.
 
I agree this sounds like a hard drive issue. There are a couple ways to test this:

1. The simplest is a SMART test. Something like this:
http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm
It's a quick check, utilizing the checks that are built into the drive.

2. If that doesn't reveal anything conclusive, you can try a scan of the drive with a program like SeaTools.
http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm
Just burn it to a CD and boot off of it. There is a short and long test. If errors are found, they may be fixed, depending on the severity of the issue and the brand of drive you are testing.
 
Hard Drive would be the first thing I woulk test as well. If not, could be a bad stick of ram, malware or a corrupted driver.
 
Out of curiosity, how much memory do you have installed in the machine? Vista really needs at least 4GB or more, otherwise it will begin to severely bog down over time as it bloats up -- your current install is old enough to have this problem (especially with a slow older model hard drive like you have).

I agree, though, with everybody else that the place to start is to test the hard drive for faults. You should be able to download WD's diagnostic software for the hard drive from here:

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=606&sid=3&lang=en

If that doesn't turn up any problems, it wouldn't hurt to test for a failing memory module. Download a MEMTEST86+ ISO and burn it to a CD or flash drive:

Bootable MEMTEST86+ CD
Bootable flash drive installer for MEMTEST86+

Boot the CD or flash drive on your machine and test your memory modules. As an alternative, you can also run a Windows Memory diagnostic. In the start menu search box, type the word memory and click on the Windows Memory Diagnostic application.

In any event, it is always a good idea to make sure you have a complete backup of at minimum your important files or (preferably) of your entire hard drive. You can download backup software (a WD version of Acronis True Image) from the following link:

http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119&wdc_lang=en
 
HDTune can test the drive as well. I fail to see why he would need 4GB of RAM. I'm running windows 7 with 2 GB of RAM on a laptop with zero problems.
 
John Connor said:
HDTune can test the drive as well. I fail to see why he would need 4GB of RAM. I'm running windows 7 with 2 GB of RAM on a laptop with zero problems.
Click to expand...

I agree. 2GB is where you need to be with Vista, 7 or 8 for good performance. Going from 2GB to 4GB can help some but nothing like making the jump from 1GB to 2GB.
 
It's 64bit vista ultimate. I have 4gb of ram. I scheduled a full HDD check and scan for errors and restarted the machine so it could do it while I slept. When I awoke it had loaded my desktop with no reports to be seen, so I don't know if it encountered any problems. The issue seems largely resolved, for the time being at least however.
 
Having a lot of problems. A hard drive scan turned up no errors or issues. But the machine was still taking 5-10 mins to load anything so I tried a number of things. I

-Changed the Sata cable
-plugged the sata cable into another sata input on the motherboard
-tried starting from scratch with two completely different hard drives in my collection.

The two other hard drives didn't help. They're detected in the bios, but when I try to install vista on them from the cd it can't detect them. I loaded drivers from the motherboard drivers disc in hopes of detecting the drives to appear but it still showed nothing. When I tried installing XP from another disc just to see if it would make a difference I got a blue screen mid way saying windows is restarting my machine to stop damage from happening to my computer. The only hdd that the vista disc seems to pick up on is the my main one.

Unfortunately, when I tried hooking up the main one again figuring I would simply put up with the sluggish speed, I got a black screen saying windows can't be loaded because a registry file is missing or corrupt. The repair function wasn't able to fix it, so I tried reinstalling vista on the main drive from scratch. After a couple hours it finally worked, but it's still very, very slow. At this point I don't know if it's the drive, or the motherboard...
 
Speaking of motherboards, what mfg. and model of mobo do you have? The first thing I'd do is clear the CMOS, connect just one drive, then restart the computer and verify that the BIOS storage configuration is set for both SATA and AHCI.
 
Have you cleared the CMOS yet? This is a very recent ASRock mobo with UEFI instead of a legacy BIOS. Here's the H77M-ITX User Manual and on page 47 is a screenshot of the Advanced\Storage Configuration settings showing both SATA and AHCI enabled; verify that your settings are just like that. Save and exit UEFI to test if your drive/s are now detected by the Windows installer when you load the Vista install DVD.

.
 
Well I just restarted after installing 122 important updates following the reinstall of VIsta and it said the harddrive needed to be checked for consistancy. It ran and purged a whole ton of files, replaced others, found lot's of corruption. So I guess it is the hard drive and the mobo is just having a hard time picking up on the two Hitachi Raptor hdd's I have. Sata and AHCI are enabled. What could cause the windows install to not pick up on a blank hard drive when the bios show the drive present under hardware installer and boot priority? I appreciate you're going through the trouble of looking into this regardless.
 
If there are errors other than file system errors on those Raptors, you should test them with Hitachi's Drive Fitness Tool. The following link is for the Windows version of DFT that runs from your desktop, and I would suggest you look at the SMART report and run both the short and extended tests on both Raptors. If those drives have problems, this tool will find them: HGST Windows Drive Fitness Test (WinDFT)

.
 
Sophitia said:
Well I just restarted after installing 122 important updates following the reinstall of VIsta and it said the harddrive needed to be checked for consistancy. It ran and purged a whole ton of files, replaced others, found lot's of corruption.
Click to expand...

So the hard drive, that Vista is on now, is having some issues (I assume it said issues were found on C drive?). That makes sense based on what you are reporting. If you run the program Bubbaleone mentioned, there is at least a chance it can fix the errors.
 
Bubbaleone said:
If there are errors other than file system errors on those Raptors, you should test them with Hitachi's Drive Fitness Tool. The following link is for the Windows version of DFT that runs from your desktop, and I would suggest you look at the SMART report and run both the short and extended tests on both Raptors. If those drives have problems, this tool will find them: HGST Windows Drive Fitness Test (WinDFT)

.
Click to expand...

The two Hitachi raptors can't be checked if windows can't pick up on them. That was the issue, when my main drive kept giving me problems and it had all the errors on a scan I tried to use both of the raptors to install windows on instead. But the install disc can't pick up on them, despite both drives being picked up by the motherboard in the bios. Hence the quandary.
 
Well, had more issues again. :'( The computer seems to be going off on a being able to detect the hdd/not being able to tangent. I'm now afraid to ever restart the machine because of any hiccups it will encounter during start up. The strange thing is the windows install/repair disc couldn't pick up on either of the two raptor hdd's, but now it's spotty as for whether or not it picks up on the main drive too. I don't know whether the motherboard is suffering from an i/o issue or if it really is the hard drive. Windows had some data on the error when I finally got it to work. The windows repair keeps saying it's a corrupt registry, which sometimes can repair and sometimes can not. But even after a full format and reinstall it's still having problems.

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: BlueScreen
OS Version: 6.0.6002.2.2.0.256.1
Locale ID: 1033

Additional information about the problem:
BCCode: c0000218
BCP1: FFFFF88000C51C50
BCP2: 0000000000000000
BCP3: 0000000000000000
BCP4: 0000000000000000
OS Version: 6_0_6002
Service Pack: 2_0
Product: 256_1

Files that help describe the problem:
C:\Windows\Minidump\Mini082113-01.dmp
C:\Users\Katie\AppData\Local\Temp\WER-182864-0.sysdata.xml
C:\Users\Katie\AppData\Local\Temp\WER4D25.tmp.version.txt
 
Last edited by a moderator:
You probably have one of two things bad.
Either bad RAM or a bad driver.from all the test above i would Recommend you.
to boot up into the Safe mode (F8)
If you still experience BSOD in the Safe mode, then you probably have bad RAM.
If the BSOD does not occur in the Safe mode, then it's probably a driver.
Best guess would be your video driver.
 
Well, problem is half-solved. I couldn't get the vista installer to pick up on the 80gb raptors no matter what I did despite both showing up under Sata5 in the bios. I was however able to get XP to install on the back up hard drive after I changed the sata interface from UEFI to IDE in the advanced bios screen. (before that the windows xp installer would blue screen when trying to use it with my back up hard drives) I was sort of hoping letting XP format and partiton the hard drive would help the Vista installer in detecting the raptor drive, but it did not. At least XP installed without a hitch and I can web browse without a hitch. :/

(although updating is proving problematic, I knew enough to install SP3 right away, but otherwise windows automatic update isn't working or telling me what updates I need next. ) Any how, I guess I'm just going to have to buy a new hard drive with the hopes the vista installer disc recognizes it as easilly as my main drive that is now beginning to fail. Would this drive work with the Vista Installer disc?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136769

Perhaps I was over do for another hdd anyway, with a 250gb dying and two 80gb's only working with XP... One review though concenred me.
"Windows Vista did not detect it. I had to use Ultimate Boot Disk (freeware) in order to establish partitions, then Windows was able to format into NTFS. This is not the hard drive manufacturers' fault. Works great now."
Click to expand...

What is this ultimate book disk? And can it help vista recognize the raptors?
 
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