Why my wintel box is getting slower and slower

May 26, 2005 10:32 AM

I have an HP A330n which seems to get slower and slower. It takes 30-600 secs just to open My Computer. Any non-software purchase, reinstall Windows ideas?

No virus's (McAfee) or spyware, malware, hijack. (Microsoft and Adaware). I use Firefox (takes 30 seconds to boot) exclusively and have had to resort to Thunderbird as Outlook 2003 takes at at least a minute and a half before I can do anything with it. DO I have to reinstall Windows again?
Just going Start>Programs gives a blank column for 30 secs. This is making me nuts! I know with a fresh install everything was peachy but one has to have another option other than spending more money on software to fix it or reinstalling Windows to be able to use a machine for more than six months.

posted by thimk to Computers & Internet (14 answers total)

You could try to defrag, that might help. But your best bet is probably to just wipe the hard drive and reinstall Windows.
posted by geeky at 10:40 AM on May 26, 2005

Response by poster: I forgot I run defrag (DisKeeeper) often. Drive is not fragged.
posted by thimk at 10:46 AM on May 26, 2005

what is using the cpu time?
posted by andrew cooke at 10:52 AM on May 26, 2005

Go to the Task Manager to see if there's something chewing up CPU time or memory. (Or get Process Explorer.)

See the XP Tweaking guides mentioned here.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 10:54 AM on May 26, 2005

Hi thmk --
I also have an A330N that was running slowly...
I was able to speed it up by disabling the themes (goodbye candy-lookin' xp) and by pruning the services and startup option.

To see what you have running, type [WIN]+R to open the Run menu without waiting for your Start menu, and type msconfig.

The Services and Startup tabs show you what is running. Do some googling to figure out what you need, and what you don't. Uncheck what you don't need, and repeat.
Good luck.
posted by mattybonez at 11:12 AM on May 26, 2005

Get the free MS beta of their Anti-Spyware tool and let it go to work
posted by Cosine at 11:18 AM on May 26, 2005

Go to start -> Run and type "msconfig" and then press OK , this will bring up a utility that will allow you to tweak what starts. I'd start with the startup tab and uncheck the things that you don't really need to start on bootup. Reboot and see if perfromance is improved. I'd also give Webroot's Spy sweeper a try. It's a full featured 30 day demo and found things that both Adaware and Spybot S&D missed.
posted by white_devil at 11:18 AM on May 26, 2005

How much RAM you got? If you do a ctrl+alt+del and go into the task manager, under the performance tab you'll see a box that says Physical Memory... compare the Total in that box (it is in K, so you can drop the last 3 digits to find out how many megs it is) and compare it with how much your machine is actually using (indicated in both the PF Usage box and as the total in the Commit Charge (K) box). If you're using more ram than you physically have, then that means it needs to store stuff on the hard disk, which is several orders of magnitude slower than RAM.

Here's some general figures: If you're running Windows XP then you should have at least 256megs of RAM. If you do more than surfing and simple text editing, then that number should probably be 512megs of RAM. If you need more RAM then that you must be a professional developer (software, video, audio, graphics, etc...).
posted by furtive at 11:33 AM on May 26, 2005

I had a similar problem with opening "My Computer" or any other file dialog boxes on my home PC. I don't know if this is the same problem you're having, but you could try:

Open up "services" and see if Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) is running. If it is, disable it and reboot. This was the fix for my problem.

Something that was bogging down my work PC to the point of it being almost uselessly slow, was the Windows Quality of Service network settings. I removed it and my problem was solved. Supposedly QOS is a Good Thing but I haven't missed it one bit.
posted by bondcliff at 11:52 AM on May 26, 2005

Another idea: If you have tons of files (like your mp3) inside your "My Documents" folder, try moving them to different root folders on the C: drive. You can also disable the "special features" of the My Documents folder somehow. Try right-clicking on it and hunting around. I don't have one on my current computer and can't remember exactly how to do this.

(As I just searched the web for this it seems this may have been a problem only on Windows 98 but you didn't mention your OS...)
posted by jacobsee at 12:56 PM on May 26, 2005

I second getting Process Explorer . . . very helpful.
posted by jacobsee at 12:58 PM on May 26, 2005

Response by poster: I have used Process Explorer and whittled down processes. I still have 50+ running chewing up all but 90mb of 512 mb RAM.

I DO use Microsoft Anti Spyware and Ad-Aware.

Not much using CPU in Task Manager.

Hard DIsk is Half full and defragged.
I even use boot time defragging.
I do have a shitload of programs installed (4 columns at 1280 x1024).
posted by thimk at 1:45 PM on May 26, 2005

To pick a nit, please don't call it Adaware. It's Ad-aware, and it's made by Lavasoft. The distinction is important because there's also something called Ada-ware, which is far more insidious.

On preview: You've simply got too much software. Make a habit of uninstalling things you don't need at the moment. It also sounds like a hell of a lot of pointless processes are running at startup. My method of dealing with this, which is rather brute-force and probably not the best, is to first clear out the "Startup" folder of my start menu, then run msconfig.exe and uncheck anything on the startup tab that isn't completely vital. I don't understand why so many vendors feel they have the right to haphazardly bloat your system.
posted by squidlarkin at 7:11 AM on May 27, 2005

50 processes seems like an awful lot. My computer has 15 processes that are part of Windows, and another 15-20 that are open applications or background processes such as virus scanners, firewall and so on.

If it helps, the core Windows processes on my computer are as follows:

csrss.exe DPCs n/a
explorer.exe Interrupts
lsass.exe services.exe
smss.exe spoolsv.exe
svchost.exe svchost.exe
svchost.exe svchost.exe
System 4 System Idle Process
winlogon.exe

So everything else beyond these should be there for a known reason, if not, get rid of them...

I second squidlarkin's opinion on clearing out your startup programs. I use the program, which installs as part of Control Panel: Startip Control Panel


Also, as has been said, Process Explorer is really useful. You should check what DLLs explorer.exe has loaded, as many programs (Acrobat, Real, etc) install themselves into explorer, and this slows everything down a lot. You can remove some of these from 'Manage Add-ons' in Internet Explorer options.

If the programs you have installed are not running in the background, or integrated into Windows, they shouldnt really affect the speed significantly. I probably have more programs than that, and it doesnt seem to make any difference.

Two other tools that are useful, PageDefrag and Bootvis.
Bootvis seems to do a much better job of speeding things up than the Diskeeper boot time defragmentation, at least I find that to be the case.
posted by Boobus Tuber at 9:25 AM on May 27, 2005