Slow PC!

[Morrus]

My laptop is driving me nuts!

These days it runs really, really slowly. If I right click on a file, it takes nearly 30 seconds of the hars drive whitting away to populate the right click menu. If I hit "show desktop", the open windows will actually take about 10 seconds to disappear. Shutting the PC down take about 5 minutes.

I have almost nothing running in the background, according to Task Manager. I run a daily virus check (AVG), Ad Aware and Spybot. Every 3 days I run a registry cleaner called "Clean My PC". As far as I can tell, the PC is fairly clean.

I clean up my temp folders regularly. I defrag my PC every so often (although its currently telling me that it is not needed). I don't run particularly intensive stuff on it (no photoshop or games).

I'm at a loss - other than reformatting and reisntalling Winows XP, I can't think what else I can do. I really don't want to have to do that, as it will involve a lot of backing up of stuff. I kinda wish I'd partitioned the drive when I got it, but its too late now!

Any ideas? Am I missing something obvious?

 

[Psionicist]

For starters, add DiskCheckup to your arsenal of maintenance applications: http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm

DiskCheckup is a very small program that will check the health of the hard drive when you run it. It takes less than a second to run the program and it's mostly correct (a full blown hard drive inspector program will take hours to run). I doubt your problem is a failing hard drive, but it's worth checking because it would be so annoying if the hard drive actually was the problem.

Is there anything interesting (warnings or errors) in the event log? (Control Panel > Administrative Tools)

This is far fetched, but check if any of the installed certificates have expired. You can do this from IE (can also do it from Firefox, but it's easier with IE). Tools > Options > (one of the tabs) > Certificates. If that's the case you can download updated certificates from the optional part of windows update. This caused a very similiar problem with Norton Antivirus and Windows around 2004 when one of the certificates expired, for whatever reason.

Other than that, you can run AutoRuns http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Autoruns.html to check for all the programs that autorun when you start windows. The list will be huge. Check for curious entries.

 

[silvermane]

Check if memory recognition does not fail (if you have more than one memory chip). I have two, and occassionally one of them is not detected by BIOS on startup, but a power cycle usually fixes the problem. Of course, I only detect it when Windows runs sluggishly, and never on the POST screen.

 

[trancejeremy]

Yeah, it does sound like you don't have enough memory. Either something is eating it up, or it's missing.

Also, you might try rolling WinXP back. I had a problem a little while ago where my cd/dvd rom drives were slow as molasses. Rolling back fixed it.

 

[redhawk]

A few things to consider...

My laptop is driving me nuts!

These days it runs really, really slowly. If I right click on a file, it takes nearly 30 seconds of the hars drive whitting away to populate the right click menu. If I hit "show desktop", the open windows will actually take about 10 seconds to disappear. Shutting the PC down take about 5 minutes.

I have almost nothing running in the background, according to Task Manager. I run a daily virus check (AVG), Ad Aware and Spybot. Every 3 days I run a registry cleaner called "Clean My PC". As far as I can tell, the PC is fairly clean.

I clean up my temp folders regularly. I defrag my PC every so often (although its currently telling me that it is not needed). I don't run particularly intensive stuff on it (no photoshop or games).

I'm at a loss - other than reformatting and reisntalling Winows XP, I can't think what else I can do. I really don't want to have to do that, as it will involve a lot of backing up of stuff. I kinda wish I'd partitioned the drive when I got it, but its too late now!

Any ideas? Am I missing something obvious?

You defrag and you clean temp files - that's important. I'd run a scandisk on it, make sure that you don't have some structural problem that needs resolving.

At this point, I'd back up your data (you _DO_ have backups, right?), wipe, and reinstall. Windows accumulates cruft, especially if you do a lot of install, test, uninstall type behaviors.

It could be a hardware fault, and with lappys that's always a possibility, but I wouldn't go there until you eliminate other possibilities first.

Out of curiousity, which version of Windows is Mr Laptop running?

Redhawk

 

[Morrus]

It's XP, redhawk.

Thanks, everyone. I'll give all these things a try and see if it helps. I sincerely hope it isn't a hardware issue!

 

[Thanee]

I kinda wish I'd partitioned the drive when I got it, but its too late now!

Why is that? You can add/remove and change partitions without reformatting the hard drive.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Rackhir]

Windows does not "age" well. Try re-installing it from scratch, Windows has a nasty habit of getting slower with time, especially if you do a lot of installs and uninstalls of applications.

 

[XCorvis]

Why is that? You can add/remove and change partitions without reformatting the hard drive.

And your existing data is destroyed. You can do it with a 3rd party tool, but it's risky and costs money.


Morrus, if you check the system tray (down by the clock) do you see a lot of icons there? If your system is slowing down, but you're spyware free, you probably just have a lot of junk programs running. Realplayer, quicktime, winamp, printers, desktop search - all kinds of programs dump supposedly "helpful" things in your system tray, and they make your system run like crap. Many of these things can be turned off (winamp), but some have to be manually removed (Realplayer).

If you're running a desktop search program, or a desktop widget program (like konfabulator), try turning it off for a while and see if things get better.

 

[IronWolf]

And your existing data is destroyed. You can do it with a 3rd party tool, but it's risky and costs money.

You can resize partitions without destroying data and there are free tools to do it in the open source community. A Knoppix Live Linux CD has a tool called QTParted on it which can resize Windows partitions. Just boot off the Knoppix CD and then fire up QTParted.

It is of course well encouraged to back your data up before doing this. While I have done this many times with no ill effects (and on machines I do care about) it is better safe than sorry as there is some risk involved - whether the tool as a free open source tool or a tool that cost money.

Morrus, if you check the system tray (down by the clock) do you see a lot of icons there? If your system is slowing down, but you're spyware free, you probably just have a lot of junk programs running. Realplayer, quicktime, winamp, printers, desktop search - all kinds of programs dump supposedly "helpful" things in your system tray, and they make your system run like crap. Many of these things can be turned off (winamp), but some have to be manually removed (Realplayer).

If you're running a desktop search program, or a desktop widget program (like konfabulator), try turning it off for a while and see if things get better.

And this bit is good pieces of advice. There are several programs out there that aren't considered spyware but can still slow your system down.