posted
Over the last week or so, I've been having some really bad performance problems when using windows. Occasionally, the computer will just randomly lock up for around five minutes. During that time, the computer responds extremely slowly. For example, keyboard inputs are still read, but each keypress would take around 30 seconds before having any effect. The task manager and the taskbar also are effected by these problems.
I haven't been able to pin down one cause, although it does seem to happen more often when Itunes is running. I've checked processor and memory usage, but the problem doesn't seem to be there. I've also tried a boot time virus scan and that came up clean, so I'm pretty much stumped. I'm pretty sure it isn't a hardware issue, since these problems only occur when windows is in use.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to track down the cause of this problem?
Posts: 2437 | Registered: Apr 2005
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posted
Get a second opinion from your virus software.
Ad-Aware is a pretty solid program IMO, and it often finds stuff that my other program, AVG, does not find.
What kind of processor are you using, and how much ram do you have? You mentioned the problems have been going on for about a week or so, how fast was your computer at doing things before then?
When did you last defrag? Have you checked what processes are running in the background whenever you start seeing slow up? That might help you see exactly what is hogging all your CPU processing power.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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I gave ad-aware and spybot, but they turned up nothing more than a few tracking cookies. I tried looking at the processes, but nothing in particular seems to be taking up too much processor time. Defraging might be the problem, I suppose, since I haven't done that in a while. I suppose I'll give that a try and let you know how it works.
Posts: 2437 | Registered: Apr 2005
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edit: if you're not, this actually sounds like a potential hardware problem to me. More specifically, a hard drive problem.
But, one good way to test that is to check the size of your paging file. Right click my computer -> Advanced -> Click Settings under "Performance" -> Advanced -> under Virtual Memory click Change.
This will bring you to the virtual memory manager. Make sure it's set for either System Managed Size or manually increase it so the minimum is equal to the amount of RAM you have and the maximum is equal to double that. Hit okay, then apply, and close out the rest of the Windows. Also make sure that you have at least triple the amount of RAM you have in available hard drive space, particularly if you have system managed virtual memory. Once you get beyond 50% of your hard drive space used, hard drive performance under heavy use (like, surprisingly, listening to music or watching downloaded movies) degrades heavily.
If you still have trouble after the virtual memory mumbo jumbo, my guess is that the hard drive is on a downhill to failure. (I can only guess because intermittent problems are a serious pain in the rear to diagnose)
[ April 29, 2008, 02:24 AM: Message edited by: Boris ]
Posts: 3003 | Registered: Oct 2004
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posted
Windows and Ubuntu 8.04. Although now that I think about it, my Ubuntu partitions might all be on my new hard drive. If that's the case, you're probably right about the imminent hard drive failure. I already have most anything important backed up, so I suppose I'll just have to ride it out until I can get a new hard drive.
Posts: 2437 | Registered: Apr 2005
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To test your hard drive, you might try running fsck on your old harddrive. It will complain at you if your harddrive is going downhill.
Posts: 106 | Registered: Dec 2003
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