Laptop soooo slowwwwwwwww!

[BMM389EC]

Hello All
Lately my laptop has become so slow. Takes for ever to start up and also takes ages to open an IE page etc. Never used to be so bad.
I've done a disk clean up, defrag, scanned for virus/adware/spyware and everything comes back fine-but it's still painfully slow.
Any ideas?

[Bushfiva]

Scan again using ad-aware and spybot to confirm that the machine is relatively clean. Then run CCleaner. After that, let Erunt and NTRegopt look at the registry. All these tools are safe and useful.

Also, let Trend Micro's Housecall scan your system, it's pretty good at picking up stuff. You can get a free scan at the website.

Incidentally, after booting and with the computer sitting idle, how much CPU is it using and what application is using it? Ideally, CPU should be around 10% on an idle computer and the main process should be System Idle Process at 90% or higher.

If you don't routinely use Start -> Search to look for stuff within files, turn of Microsoft's indexing service. That can bring some systems to their knees.

After that, if there's no improvement, then we need to dig deeper :-)

[Duff beer]

I started exactly the same thread on here a few pages back, have a look.

I tried every solution offered by the kind people, but nothing helped. I even deleted my protection from my laptop and bought the best McAfee anti-everything I could find but it didnt help. I started to think it might be a hardware problem.

I then decided to pick up the phone book and find a local, back street pc repair shop (not pc world!!).

Told him my problem.....£35 for a complete clean up.

Machine is like new. Brilliant.

[Cypherus]

Probably just emptied Prefetch, Temp and Temporary internet files, cleared down the history file and unchecked all the crappie little utilities that have infested your start-up section, Wish I had the kneck to charge someone for doing that, would have made a mint over the years. :ugh:

[Gertrude the Wombat]

Ideally, CPU should be around 10% on an idle computer
Er, no. Well below 1%. If something is eating 10% CPU it's doing some real work, eg sending out spam, but slowly enough that it hopes you won't notice ... and anyone who blieves that "Ideally, CPU should be around 10% on an idle computer" is probably daft enough not to notice!!

[Eboy]

1. There are various startup managers that will let you see what utilities are booting and let you stop unneeded ones from booting. I use "Absolute Startup" but there are many other good ones.

2. I have not seen disk usage mentioned. Even after all the cleanup above, you should have at least 10 percent or so, or more, of your hard disk as free space. Otherwise, your disk spends too much time thrashing trying to allocate your data to sectors.

[Tarq57]

Duff Beer,
I'd be fairly interested to know what that tech did, if he itemised it/told you, and you're willing to share.

[Bushfiva]

Gertrude, I'll call you on that. Open Task Manager, look at the CPU usage and tell me honestly that it's below 1% on your system. Hint: Task Manager itself takes about 2% on an average system. Right now, mine's around 6%, what with the random idiocies of Mr Norton doing stuff when no stuff needs to be done.

[stickyb]

Win2K, 2.4GHz Celeron, and I can't get task manager to go above 1%, even setting it to its fastest refresh/update speed

For the OP's problem, i agree that some measurement would be nice, but i would hazard a guess, assuming no virus, etc, that it is clogged up with lots of junk starting automatically, and also maybe windows update doing its thing periodically.

[Bushfiva]

I'll concede limited defeat on the 1%/6%/10% thing, because one person's idle is another person's quite busy what with Skype, VPN, encryption drivers and stuff doing their thing. :8

And the machine's been defragged. And we can assume the swap area is fine, and there's enough RAM since the computer has slowed down, not always been slow. So I concur, it's a quest for the pile of stuff starting up at boot time.

I'd be tempted to try a safe boot (F8) and see if that feels a little faster, then that would point one in the right direction. I'd normally recommend running Hijack This, but the listing tells strangers an awful lot about what one does with one's computer and it does seem to concern people around here :) . Would be nice to know if there's anything sat there thinking it's a server of some kind, though.

[Saintsman]

We had the same problem which was caused by McAffe anti spam. We thought that the spam was being deleted but it wasn't. We had to manually delete the 'deleted' spam. Then it worked fine.

The problem soon came back though and now we run it without the anti spam software and without problems.

[NutLoose]

I run a programme called windows washer, it cleans off all the junk off your hard drive, deletes all the records of your browsing and clears all the caches out.......... Have ran it since had PC and 4 years later is still running fine :) Originally bought it because I do a lot of gaming so it make it runs faster..

http://www.webroot.com/consumer/products/windowwasher/

[stickyb]

And we can assume the swap area is fine, and there's enough RAM since the computer has slowed down, not always been slow.

Not always true.The swap file may have become deleted/damaged, or got itself very fragmented by expanding from a small initial size.

Best not to assume anything, is easy enough to check.

[Keef]

Thanks - you reminded me! My laptop has been taking ever longer to boot and to shut down. Once it's up and running, it seems OK. It's just the 5 minutes to start and close...

So I ran CCleaner, and NTRegOpt. No noticeable improvement.

I noticed that my Registry is (it tells me) 37MB. That seems a tad large - especially for a laptop. What do folks think?

[Gertrude the Wombat]

Gertrude, I'll call you on that. Open Task Manager, look at the CPU usage and tell me honestly that it's below 1% on your system.
Yup. Mosly says 0, occasionally 1. This typing isn't bringing it up any higher.

Open windows: task manager; Windows explorer; this browser window; Visual Studio 2005 and its help system; control panel Services applet; a custom and rather nasty piece of Java. Machine: not too ancient desktop, designed for building software not playing games, 3.4GHz, 2G RAM. But I get the same sub-1% behaviour on all my other machines, including vastly slower ones than this.

Look, I got paid lots of money to spend most of last week finding out why one particular application, which was doing a lot of polling, was eating 10% CPU whilst idle, as that was clearly completely unacceptable. I got it down to below 1%, even up after making it run six times faster, ie I improved its performance by a factor of 60.

Maybe you've got some simlarly badly engineered applications running?

Whatever, if you think 10% idle CPU is normal you're used to some very odd behaviour.

[Bushfiva]

Saintsman, I've got a machine here where McAffee is using about 30% of CPU. Grotty bit of software.

[Bushfiva]

Maybe you've got some simlarly badly engineered applications running?

Two years on the same machine? Yes, several, I expect :}

[Duff beer]

Sorry MARKJOY never asked him. Just bloody relieved to see it work again.

[NG708]

Well, I seem to have the same problems. My CPU is ticking over in the high 30% range. It sometimes goes up to 100% with nothing obvious happening.
I ran most of the cleaning programs, Norton Webclean, AdAware etc. Defragged the disk, done a full anitvirus scan and installed Absolute Startup, which allowed me to identify and shut down a few more.
But what with the full set of Norton Security installed and a load of app's I can't identify, I have around 35 applications running in the task manager window.
Does anyone know the best way to identify what these are, to see if I need them, or to stop them from running?
I'm not an expert at this so it needs to be kept relatively straightforward folks!!:\

[Cypherus]

Applications or Processes, if it,s under the Processes Tab, simlpy click the USER NAME header once to sort the items into catagory, your shold now be all at the top of the listing, i.e. items tha you are running, firewall and antivirus/spyware ect, browser, explorer and of course Task manager.

This shold be followed by:

LOCAL SERVICES

NETWORK SERVICES

SYSTEM.

To ID any process currently running in your task manager listings goto this site: http://www.processlibrary.com/

Enter the name of the .exe as listed into the search box and you will get back a detailed page of information on the item, if you can or should remove it, how to fix it it's broken and a host of other tools on the top half of the page alone, below that a full library of all current .exe that can be found in the process listing.

[BMM389EC]

When its idle CPU use is 1-3%?

[Saab Dastard]

I wonder if this could be to do with Windows falling back to PIO disk access instead of using Ultra DMA x?

In Device Manager, go to the IDE interface and check out the properties for the Primary IDE - is it set to "Use DMA if available"? And what mode does it say it is using?

If it's PIO then that's the problem. You will have to hack the registry if you need to force it back to DMA.

Windows XP attempts to use the fastest hardware mode available, until it encounters errors reading from the disk (or writing to). It then falls back to the lowest mode without errors - or the lowest available (PIO), whichever happens first.

Problem is, once you fix the errors (chkdsk /R), windows DOES NOT reset to DMA, even if you set it in Device Manager. Hence the need to manipulate the registry entries.

A couple of things you can check to confirm that disk access mode is the problem is to look at the Event Viewer / System log - look for ATAPI / Disk errors and / or warnings, and also to look for a high CPU utilisation by Hardware Interrupts.

Of course if a disk has initially had problems, it is usually a warning that the disk is not long for the world, so BACK UP and / or clone the disk and replace it.

SD