System suddenly ultra slow

Sonikku

Lifer
Jun 23, 2005
15,749
4,558
136
I woke my machine out of sleep mode this morning to find that everything suddenly took an eternity to load. Everything from opening applications like Word to just opening the Start menu would take 5-10 minutes, if not failing outright. I thought restarting the machine would help with the sluggish hardware performance, but it only gave me a warning that Windows high recomended wanting to try a stability check on the harddrive. After purging and restoring a number of files, windows visa loaded up and dropped me to my desktop but it was still ultra slow. Is my hard drive on it's way out?

That would appear to be the most obvious, given the check Windows ran. Now that I've booted in safe mode with networking however, everything loads blistering fast as always. If the hard drive was the only culprit, wouldn't it still be bogged down, even in safe mode? I have had no problems like this for the months I've had the machine. I can't make sense of this problem. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Intel G630cpu
Radeon 7770
Asrock 1155 mobo
4gb g skill ddr3 ram
windows Vista ultimate edition
 

cl-scott

ASUS Support
Jul 5, 2012
457
0
0
I was all set to agree with the likely possibility that the HDD was heading south for the winter when you just had to go and mention the bit about Safe Mode. If it were a hardware issue, it should apply to both normal and safe mode operation equally.

So now it sounds more like you've got some kind of a software program that is bogging things down. Since it doesn't happen in Safe Mode, that means it's something you installed, and you get the unenviable task of going through them one by one until you find the problem child.
 

Sonikku

Lifer
Jun 23, 2005
15,749
4,558
136
I tried selective start up and disabled everything not related with Microsoft and everything seems to be loading just fine ultra fast. Now it would appear it is some process or application running in the background. I don't know whether to be relieved that I don't need to buy another harddrive or dismayed that I may now need to spend a LOT of time togging on processes one by one on restart.
 

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,229
9,990
126
Some HP printer drivers have an issue where they will take nearly 100% of CPU time for some reason. Thank goodness I have a reliable brother printer, LOL.