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What could cause extreme OS slowdown?

essential

essential

Senior member
a friend of mine got a laptop about a month ago, i set it up for them the day they got it ... just kind of configured a few things, installed a couple programs, and it was running as fast as a windows xp home machine could run on 512ram.

i got it back today cause they said it was running extremely slow ... and it is. the most recent norton defs, and the most recent spy sweeper defs come up with no infected files. i cleared all temp file and old prefetch data and defragged, and there is no change.

what else can i do to check would could be causing the extreme slow speeds? when windows boots it takes like 5 mins, folders load slow, the bootup sounds are choppy.

blah, any ideas would be helpful, thanks.
 
yeah check DMA like drag said. go to device manager and select the IDE or SATA primary controller. try a linux bootdisk to see if the machine is slow with linux as well. also, get Norton of that laptop. norton slows down any computer.
 
i will try that, but why did it run fast, and now it doesn't? could DMA have been on once, and now it got switched off by something, cause like i said it was running fast like a month ago when they bought it.
 
yeah, run MSConfig to check what is starting. Another strange problem I have seen once or twice is event logger taking tons of resources, try disabling it in control-panel/Admin Tools/services
 
Originally posted by: essential
i will try that, but why did it run fast, and now it doesn't? could DMA have been on once, and now it got switched off by something, cause like i said it was running fast like a month ago when they bought it.
Click to expand...

If Windows has repeated difficulty in reading the hard drive, it will change the setting from DMA to PIO (or is it POI ?..whatever.) 😱
 
transfer mode was set to "DMA, if available" but the current transfer mode said it was PIO, so maybe DMA isn't avaliable on this. i cleared all the startup too. oh well, maybe the HD is just going bad already and it isn't an OS problem.
 
The way to correct forced PIO mode is to go to device manager and delete the controller for that drive. Reboot and allow XP to redetect the controller.

This does not explain how XP fell back (it does this upon read/write errors) to PIO mode. It could have been as simple as a CD burn error or trying to install something from a scratched CD.

I also vote for replacing Norton with another A/V program. I use AVG free. After uninstalling Norton, I further suggest using the Norton remover tool. http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/tsgeninfo.nsf/docid/2005033108162039


Jim
 
XP will switch it off DMA mode automaticly when it notices a problem.

It's designed to protect your data as PIO modes and such are more safe for your data. I don't remember were they are that in Windows, but check the error messages and such and see if you can find something complaining about the hardware. Also it's probably worth checking for newer drivers or possibly a BIOS/firmware upgrade. It's not uncommon for people to ship buggy hardware that would need new drivers to find work arounds.

It can be the harddrive, it can be controller, or it can be the cable connecting both of them. If it's the harddrive you can probably check it using 'SMART', which your drive manufacturer will supply utilities for; usually you'll find floppy images, disk health utilities and such things.

Sometimes crashes and such will cause XP to change to DMA, but I don't know of all the circumstances were that will happen. I suppose a bad cdrom can possibly cause it.. like any cdrom that the system fails to read or causes hiccups in the OS and such.

Any remotely modern computer and harddrive (say pentium1 and newer) should have no problem supporting DMA access as long as you have the drivers for the ide controller. It's been standard feature for many years on everything as it's such a important to have for performance.
 
You mentioned Norton - that in itself can cause system slowdowns. Also, excessive fragmentation, and bloated background utilities.
 
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