computer emulates molasses
July 28, 2005 7:14 PM Subscribe
Need help with a perplexing computer slowdown.
Ok, here's the situation. AMD Athlon 2400, 1GB RAM, Windows XP SP2, ATI graphics (AIW 9600).
About three days ago, my computer developed a strange affliction: when launching programs, those programs crank up to 100% CPU usage, take forever to start, and slow everything else down in the process. Typically I have BeyondTV, Kerio Personal Firewall, Konfabulator, and Trillian running at all times; the problem, however, occurs whether any (one or all) of these programs are running.
I thought it might be my firewall, but I unloaded that and the problem cropped up. I thought it might be a runaway plugin in Firefox or Trillian, but it's not (the slowing down happened even after I rebooted and never ran either program).
After the program gets going, everything is snappy again, like the slowdown never happened. But when a program launches (and, sometimes, closes) it's like my computer slides into a bucket of glue. I've tried virus scans, adware scans, malware scrubbers, hardware scans, everything, and I can't put my finger on this one.
This isn't just normal computer slowdown either. When I start XP, everything is snappy and happy, but over time the launch behavior deteriorates. Task Manager doesn't show any processes doing anything unusual, and, again, the only process that nails the CPU is the program I'm starting, and only when the program is starting.
I'd consider myself an expert user, so "try rebooting" tips aren't going to get me very far (though, of course, all suggestions are welcome). I'm just wondering if anyone has experienced this weirdness and has some suggestions for fixes.
Ok, here's the situation. AMD Athlon 2400, 1GB RAM, Windows XP SP2, ATI graphics (AIW 9600).
About three days ago, my computer developed a strange affliction: when launching programs, those programs crank up to 100% CPU usage, take forever to start, and slow everything else down in the process. Typically I have BeyondTV, Kerio Personal Firewall, Konfabulator, and Trillian running at all times; the problem, however, occurs whether any (one or all) of these programs are running.
I thought it might be my firewall, but I unloaded that and the problem cropped up. I thought it might be a runaway plugin in Firefox or Trillian, but it's not (the slowing down happened even after I rebooted and never ran either program).
After the program gets going, everything is snappy again, like the slowdown never happened. But when a program launches (and, sometimes, closes) it's like my computer slides into a bucket of glue. I've tried virus scans, adware scans, malware scrubbers, hardware scans, everything, and I can't put my finger on this one.
This isn't just normal computer slowdown either. When I start XP, everything is snappy and happy, but over time the launch behavior deteriorates. Task Manager doesn't show any processes doing anything unusual, and, again, the only process that nails the CPU is the program I'm starting, and only when the program is starting.
I'd consider myself an expert user, so "try rebooting" tips aren't going to get me very far (though, of course, all suggestions are welcome). I'm just wondering if anyone has experienced this weirdness and has some suggestions for fixes.
Random guess: check that all the cooling fans are working, particularly the CPU fan.
posted by blue mustard at 8:00 PM on July 28, 2005
posted by blue mustard at 8:00 PM on July 28, 2005
Response by poster: Rhomboid - I've already been down the uninstalling route (as I had a beta version of KPF installed, and I thought that might be the culprit, but it appears not to have been). I've tried to throw pretty much everything sysinternals.com has posted at this problem one way or another; I love their stuff. Sadly neither their utils nor the Event Viewer offered any clues at all. And, yeah, I totally get the vagueness thing. I'm perplexed myself, since I assumed that, after 8 years of clean sailing, I'd gotten infected, but nothing is showing up. This is a peculiar problem... but I'll go through my disabled services and see if I might have dropped something that needs to be up. :)
blue mustard - that's a good suggestion, but there's no creepy behavior (in either sense of the word) when I do something else CPU-intensive. It appears to be limited to startup (and occasionally shutdown) times.
pmbuko - The drives appear to be in good shape.
Thanks for the suggestions. I know this is a mush question, but that's why I'm here. It's hard to troubleshoot something with no traceable symptoms.
posted by socratic at 10:59 PM on July 28, 2005
blue mustard - that's a good suggestion, but there's no creepy behavior (in either sense of the word) when I do something else CPU-intensive. It appears to be limited to startup (and occasionally shutdown) times.
pmbuko - The drives appear to be in good shape.
Thanks for the suggestions. I know this is a mush question, but that's why I'm here. It's hard to troubleshoot something with no traceable symptoms.
posted by socratic at 10:59 PM on July 28, 2005
This is a long shot, but I've experienced similar slowdowns like this on a flaky network. It may be network related. If possible try swapping out the network card, or maybe just turn off networking for a while and see if you experience the slowdown.
posted by edjusted at 12:10 AM on July 29, 2005
posted by edjusted at 12:10 AM on July 29, 2005
One thing that I like to use, if you are in a high-CPU situation, is to use Sysinternal's Process Explorer. Find the process that is taking up your CPU, right click on it, and see if you can see which thread is hogging your CPU. It may help you track down the cause.
(A kind of geeky semi-related blog post that discusses how to use procexp to track down this sort of performance issues is here.)
posted by stupidcomputernickname at 4:19 AM on July 29, 2005
(A kind of geeky semi-related blog post that discusses how to use procexp to track down this sort of performance issues is here.)
posted by stupidcomputernickname at 4:19 AM on July 29, 2005
Is your memory being detected correctly? This sounds like what happened to me once, when half my memory vanished (as far as the computer was concerend, anyway) and everything took longer to start because there was that much more paging going on to get new data into the remaining memory.
It doesn't sound like bad RAM, mind you. Just like you've got less.
posted by Dipsomaniac at 5:25 AM on July 29, 2005
It doesn't sound like bad RAM, mind you. Just like you've got less.
posted by Dipsomaniac at 5:25 AM on July 29, 2005
the cpu use seems odd to me. what makes something use cpu when it starts? i can see why things might start slowly with little memory, but that's slow because of disk access, not cpu use.
what uses cpu on startup? dynamic linking? you could search around to see if there's a known problem with that. what else? crap to do with ms class libraries, perhaps? is there some kind of resource that needs to be reclaimed (i'm thinking of something like garbage collection (but not gc), perhaps to free up handles of some kind? have you looked to see if there's any kind of os tuning that lets you tune system resources? perhaps something got corrupted and is at a funny level?
posted by andrew cooke at 7:26 AM on July 29, 2005
what uses cpu on startup? dynamic linking? you could search around to see if there's a known problem with that. what else? crap to do with ms class libraries, perhaps? is there some kind of resource that needs to be reclaimed (i'm thinking of something like garbage collection (but not gc), perhaps to free up handles of some kind? have you looked to see if there's any kind of os tuning that lets you tune system resources? perhaps something got corrupted and is at a funny level?
posted by andrew cooke at 7:26 AM on July 29, 2005
I've seen a similar problem on a Windows 2000 system with two network cards but only one actually hooked into a network. Disabling or removing the non-networked card fixed it.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 10:56 AM on July 29, 2005
posted by mr_crash_davis at 10:56 AM on July 29, 2005
Blue mustard said: Random guess: check that all the cooling fans are working, particularly the CPU fan.
Let me second that. I've got a machine here at work that is doing exactly what you describe, and when I ran diagnostics on it I found that the CPU fan is not working... at all. Zero RPMs.
(Now, unfortunately, due to some delays in sorting out a clerical error involving the warranty on this system, I won't know until at least Monday if the fan is the cause of the problem. But, given blue mustard's comment, I'm even more sure than I already was.)
posted by llamateur at 11:09 AM on July 29, 2005
Let me second that. I've got a machine here at work that is doing exactly what you describe, and when I ran diagnostics on it I found that the CPU fan is not working... at all. Zero RPMs.
(Now, unfortunately, due to some delays in sorting out a clerical error involving the warranty on this system, I won't know until at least Monday if the fan is the cause of the problem. But, given blue mustard's comment, I'm even more sure than I already was.)
posted by llamateur at 11:09 AM on July 29, 2005
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The first thing I would try is uninstalling (not disabling, uninstalling) any AV and firewall software and see if that affects it. Some of these programs are still running in the background even when disabled, so you have to actually uninstall them.
Normally I'd say scan for malware, but it seems you've got that covered so I'll assume you know what you're doing there.
Check the event log just to rule out any diagnostic messages from services. Incidently, it would be a good idea to check and see what you have disabled (or not disabled) at this point. For example I vaguely remember that my system would encounter random pauses when doing various tasks if I'd disabled the Protected Storage service, but setting it back to automatic fixed that. There are lots of sites that will explain this so just review your settings here and make sure you have the extraneous ones disabled but you haven't accidently gotten trigger happy with anything required.
At this point you'll have to roll up your sleeves. Start with process explorer, and see if there are any DLLs associated with the process that seem out of the ordinary. This takes some skill, because you'll have to sort the wheat from the chaff and know which DLLs are normal and which are cause for concern.
If nothing pops out at you there, then move on to FileMon and RegMon (all of these are available at sysinternals.com but if you didn't know that you probably shouldn't be mucking about at this low a level.) Set them to filter everything but the process you're starting and then see what's taking all the time. Another option at this point is HijackThis which should be another tool in the belt to see what exactly is going on at the low level.
This is all very vague advice, but I'm operating under the assumption that whatever you have can't be ruled out by a simple "you got spyware dude" reply. So therefore it will require some serious investigation and probing using the various sysinternals.com suite. You can't really give a step by step formula here, you sort of just have to know ahead of time what kind of things to look out for.
posted by Rhomboid at 7:59 PM on July 28, 2005