My computer is slow

[Matt]

Paging computer nerds. Apparently we have a lot of them.

For no apparent reason, my laptop has gotten very slow.

There is no hardware reason for it to be so. It is a 1.73 ghz Pentium mobile, with a gig of RAM, 5400 rpm drive....and is less than a year old. It was formatted and reinstalled when I did some company-wide spring cleaning about 5 months ago.

All I use it for is routine office work, which is now sluggish, and it has reached a point where I cant play a song in iTunes without it skipping, even with all other apps closed.

I dont have an abundance of software on it. I dont install and uninstall software frequently. I dont install random crap like toolbars and software from random developers etc. Personally I think I keep it pretty-damn-clean.

I have virus and spyware scanned it (I use Kaspersky at the recommendation of GQGeek, and my definitions are up to date). There were a couple of trojans buried in there which I have removed.

I have defragged it, marginal improvement.

So what do I do next?

 

[TheHoff]

Originally Posted by m@T

Paging computer nerds. Apparently we have a lot of them.

That's very endearing.

XP? Fire up Performance Monitor and see what is eating up all your cycles or RAM. Run a full DOS chkdsk to make sure you don't have any bad sectors.

 

[Matt]

Originally Posted by TheHoff

That\\'s very endearing.

dont take it personally, was referencing hamlets \\'you are all nerds and i wont take advice from you\\' thread

XP? Fire up Performance Monitor and see what is eating up all your cycles or RAM. Run a full DOS chkdsk to make sure you don\\'t have any bad sectors.

i hv no idea how to do a chkdsk thingy....i never claimed to be smart

 

[TheHoff]

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=26114 http://www.windows-help-central.com/...xp-chkdsk.html

 

[Brian278]

This is an obvious one, but is your hard disk nearly full from music/movies?

 

[Stazy]

Buy a mac. They run Vista the fastest you know...

 

[Matt]

Originally Posted by Stazy

Buy a mac. They run Vista the fastest you know...
I use a Mac at home. At work I am stuck with this thing.

 

[Matt]

Originally Posted by Brian278

This is an obvious one, but is your hard disk nearly full from music/movies?
Its partitioned (which I kinda wish it wasnt).

C drive is 18.6 gig with 4.78 free
D drive is 37.2 gig with 9.37 free

ok, right?

 

[Homme]

^ Sounds fine.

Open task manager, and see if any programs are using way more RAM than they should be. Have you tried different spyware scanners ? Ad-aware is very good. If you don't have any viruses / spyware (when those sites you look at ask if you want to download and run xxxx activex control, you click no), I can't think of anything else it may be.


Oh, and Labor won.

 

[radix023]

http://www.winpatrol.com/

Usually it's too much stuff running resident, using up your memory. WinPatrol will allow you to disable startup stuff and will also warn you when things try to add themselves. (and its free)

You may want to check your virtual memory settings and see how much space your system is configured to use for swap. With Windows, I usually allocate twice as much swap as memory (so 2G in your case).

Sometimes you're just stuck. My work has antivirus software that just decides on its own to scan the entire HD. I can't disable/stop it (need network Admin) other than by shutting down the system.

 

[ratboycom]

There was a buggy update that caused SVChost.exe to go nuts and eat ram/processor cycles, Alt+CTRL+DEL and go to processes, click on CPU twice to see which processes are using the most of the CPU at the moment, then do the same for the "mem usage" divider. Tell us if you see anything.

The way to fix such a thing (had to a few times on customer computers) is to disable auto updates, go to the auto updates folder in windows and delete a few of them, restart the computer and re-enable the auto updates.

 

[cmeisenzahl]

Defrag, make sure you have at least 10% of your HD as free space.

Also, use Firefox instead of IE. Run AdAware and Spybot, found here:
http://securitytango.com/tango.php

 

[Garfieldthecat]

Originally Posted by cmeisenzahl

Defrag, make sure you have at least 10% of your HD as free space.

Also, use Firefox instead of IE. Run AdAware and Spybot, found here:
http://securitytango.com/tango.php

Agree with the above advice. I would also suggest a program called "crap cleaner". It deletes out a lot of old temp files that may be laying around your HD, taking up space. I find that lots of old temp files can also slow a PC down.

Especially in IE, sometimes people set the temp storage really high, which bogs everything down. Crap Cleaner will delete out all of these temp files.

Adaware and Spybot will look for spyware/malware running in the background, which may be clogging things up.

 

[rnoldh]

Originally Posted by cmeisenzahl

Defrag, make sure you have at least 10% of your HD as free space.

Also, use Firefox instead of IE. Run AdAware and Spybot, found here:
http://securitytango.com/tango.php

Are these definitely better than Microsofts free anti spyware program Windows Defender. I'm satisfied with it, but it takes a very long time to do a full scan.

 

[Rambo]

Originally Posted by rnoldh

Are these definitely better than Microsofts free anti spyware program Windows Defender. I'm satisfied with it, but it takes a very long time to do a full scan.
Not really instead of. More in addition to. You really need more than one spyware checker because they frequently miss certain items. Make sure your definitions are up to date before doing any scan. M@T: Run Memtest. It sounds like your memory could be on the fritz. Instructions are in the link along with the iso: http://www.memtest.org/