Update: (Still freezing after RAM and defrag) Computer randomly slows to a crawl????

[teriba]

Hey guys,
I've been having this weird problem with my parent's old computer. Occasionally it will almost stop running, the mouse will be able to move about once a second, etc. It doesn't really matter what I am doing. Heat doesn't seem to be the problem as we have removed the case and had a big fan aimed at it and it still does it. It only slows down about once an hour or so, for a minuter or two in duration.

Specs:
AMD K7 500MHz
16MB RAM
don't know the mobo
Windows 98SE


Update:
I am now up to 196MB RAM and it has been defragged. It still randomly slows down. It doesn't seem to affect the programs performance while it does this, ie. animations on webpages still occur, etc. It's mostly just the mouse becoming unmoveable and the keyboard becoming unresponsive. I can't tell for sure if it is causing a performance decrease. I looked for Office Find Fast, but it is not on the Control Panel. Can I find it through Word? Any other ideas? I am going back to school soon so I wanted to try to get this fixed before I leave.

Merry Christmas everybody!

 

[Zim Hosein]

teriba, have you checked what programs are running in the background? I see that there's only 16MB's of RAM, woth exploring in my opinion, hope this helps.

 

[teriba]

I guess it might be RAM. I'll try to talk them into getting some more. It really sucks coming from my 1600+, 256MB DDR, etc.

 

[Silverforce]

1) low ram, therefore, lot of caching done by the swapfile. so your system will halt frequently like that if you run a lot of modern day program that demand a lot of resources.

2) harddrive may be fragmented, especially at the swapfile.

3) your motherboard is dying, a sure sign of periodic system freezes.

4) infected with a virus.

5) if you have a scsi drive, probably the scsi card is dying or loose.. i've seen this happen a few times.

hope that helps

 

[teriba]

1) I'll get them some RAM for Christmas (Micron 64MB PC133)
2) I'll defrag tomorrow
3) I'm pretty sure the mobo isn't dying because it has done this since we got it (a long time ago)
4) Pretty safe to say it's virus free
5) No SCSI

Thanks a lot. It does run alot of demanding stuff, IE6, Office XP, SETI@Home, CD burning, Dreamweaver, etc.

 

[ZZZZZZ]

128MB stick would be better and not very much cost difference

 

[BadThad]

It could be Office Find Fast indexing the drive. Open control panel and click on the FindFast icon. Go up to FILE and uncheck "Run when I log on". Also, under FILE, go to Update Interval and make it 1000 hours just in case. Also, since the memory is so limited, click on START>RUN and type in MSCONFIG. Go to the STARTUP tab and uncheck any BS programs that are launching, especially MSOFFICE. Office runs fine without being in the machines startup.

Before you defrag clean out junk files. Right click the IE icon>PROPERTIES> then delete all temp internet files and history. Go to C:\temp and/or C:\windows\temp and delete ALL files there. I usually take this time to also uninstall old programs that aren't being used any more. Be sure to dump the recycle bin when your finished. Reboot, disable your antivirus software, then defrag. For effective defragmentation, make sure there's at least 20% free hard drive space.

 

[teriba]

First message is edited. Added 196MB RAM and defragged, still happening.

 

[DJFuji]

try installing an NT-Kernel-Based OS (NT, 2k, XP) and checking processes in task manager for CPU time. Maybe an unknown process is taking up huge amounts of CPU time. There might be a way to do this in 9x, but ive never tried. Or....just reformat and reinstall

 

[teriba]

It's my parents computer though, they wouldn't be impressed. I know it's super simple in XP, just CTRL-ALT-DEL and see what's doing it.

 

[Silverforce]

Well if you havent got any programs running in the background that would cause this periodic slowdown.. then im sure it's your IDE controller on your motherboard. Did you install it's proper drivers? The default windows one sometimes causes issues.

Another thing, you might be having a memory leak. I just thought of this since i have a similar problem after using mirc/polaris for 8 hours straight my system pauses until i reboot. So yeah, once again, check to see if you have any programs that is causing this. I hope for your sake it's software related, cos if its hardware, u might have to get a new motherboard with a better IDE controller.

EDIT: You can find MSFastfind from the startup folder, just delete it.

Also, go to star, the RUN. type in msconfig and goto startup.. uncheck everything except for system tray.

 

[teriba]

It still doesn't work with the latest 4-in-1's. My dad thinks that it might be the video card, would this make sense? He thinks that the programs still run fine, but that the screen just isn't updating. Possible?

 

[AreEss64]

It's possible, but I wouldn't bet money on it.. Office FastFind should be uninstallable from Office Setup or Add/Remove Programs in CP.

If it's not installed, well, do you have Norton Utilities? Might be some part of that. GoBack (ugh... needed on the other PC, though, as it breaks from testing all the time) also does that. Very badly. It has a tendency to make a system choppy for more than 10 minutes at a time on large drives. (Two 40G's with 3G each allocated. Jeez. Pain.)

Also, 95 PowerTools has a process viewer - NU2002 has one for 95/98/98SE/XP, that's very good. It's almost definitely something in the background, though, if it's occuring on a regular basis. Unfortunately, that -does- include drivers, which means I'm not much help here.

Worth a shot though, I guess.

 

[ddeder]

<< 4) Pretty safe to say it's virus free >>



Did you run a virus scan with up to date anti-virus software?