Totally out-of-nowhere WinXP slowdowns.. big hassle

[MDesigner]

So a friend of mine is having some problems. I had a custom built PC that I built myself, used it for a couple years.. I gave it to him. Pretty slick setup, plenty of RAM, decent processor. He put WinXP on it which was what I was using.. no issues, everything's cool.

Then he tells me he was watching a movie (dont' know if it was a DVD or an .avi), and he fell asleep.. woke up, the computer was off due to a power outage. Ever since this, the computer has been acting funky. It takes nearly 8 minutes for it to boot up. The start menu takes a few minutes to come up, most things on the taskbar are SLOOWW but his desktop shortcuts to Firefox, etc., are fast. So some things are screwy, others are not. I figured maybe the power outage was preceded by a surge that messed up his RAM.. this sounds like something corrupt RAM does. He's running memtest86 now, so far no errors reported.

Anything else that might be causing this?? If it's not corrupt RAM, what else could it be? He's got anti-virus and anti-spyware stuff installed, so no worries there. I'm stumped.

 

[SparkyJJO]

Possible XP got a little messed up with the power outage. Have you tried system restore to a point right before the problem started?

 

[w00t]

When he first installed Windows XP did he install his AV + updates before plugging in the internet than after plugging it in with an up to date AV did he install windows updates?

 

[MDesigner]

I installed XP for him since I have more experience w/ it (been building systems for 10 yrs). I plugged into the internet to grab AV software.. but I've never had an issue with that. Ever. Plus he's behind a firewall (hardware). So I'm nearly positive it's not malware related.

He's tried a system restore.. no go, didn't help anything.

I'll probably have to go over there at some point & sit face to face w/ the computer. Go into safe mode, see how it behaves then.. if it's fast in safe mode, most definitely something software based got hosed. Somehow. Power outage could've just been a coincidence. If it's slow in safe mode, something worse is up. I can also boot an Ubuntu live CD and see how it operates.

 

[xgsound]

Check to see if the drives have gone to PIO mode. If so, delete the drive controller in Device Manager, reboot to redetect the controller, and that should reset DMA for the drives.


Jim

 

[MDesigner]

I'll check that out tonight. Also, booting in safe mode had the same results.. sllloooowwww.

 

[bob4432]

also, some dvds put in some malware, i think sony dvds are notorious for this. just a thought

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: xgsound
Check to see if the drives have gone to PIO mode. If so, delete the drive controller in Device Manager, reboot to redetect the controller, and that should reset DMA for the drives.

Jim

Was my thought too. If the power outage caused the MB to see disk errors before going down, it could have disabled DMA (and, of course, Windows isn't smart enough to turn it back on later.)

You can usually just reset the DMA mode without having to remove the driver, though.

 

[Agentbolt]

Maybe check the pagefile for contiguity. I had the same issue while playing a game and it turned out the pagefile got badly fragmented when the computer crashed, somehow. It was a serious PITA to defrag it too, had to install a neat little program called PageDefrag to get it done.

 

[Jiggz]

I'll do a Repair Installation if this is mine! This will definitely knock the software problem out of the way and if problem persists, it could be a hardware problem.

 

[MDesigner]

It fixed itself randomly.. go figure..

 

[jameswhite1979]

Try Bootvis see what is going on with the start up of Windows. Check out what services and msconfig (Start up tab) is apps are running. Check the event log see what might be causing a problem with the start up. Else back up his data and a fresh install not a bad idea every year or less just a bit off hassle but often less in the long run.