WinVista worse than slow...............

[rans6andrew]

Today I decided to relocate my email from a Win Vista machine that has ground to a halt. I booted the machine up and went away fro half an hour while it got to the point of responding to inputs from mouse or keyboard. Then I set it searching for the Profiles associated with Thunderbird mail browser and then I launched task manager to see what uses all of the processing effort. Not very much, appaerently. Search was using 2% or 3% CPU, task manager was using another 2% and everything else was using 0%. Switching to the graph view page showed 54% CPU being used. Switching back to the table still showed only 4% or 5% total. ?????

I noticed at the bottom of the task manager an option to open a monitor page, which I did. This page showed 4 graphs and some lines of stats. The memory utilisation was 65%, CPU 55%, Network 1% and something else, I forget what, but it was not maxed out. The lines of information were more revealing. One showed a few disk errors per second, another showed 200+ hard memory faults per second. No wonder it was straining and doing no work for me.

I think I'll remove the drive and syphon all my data from it outside of the original machine.

Seems to me that I have had a lucky escape. I could have lost a lot of work related stuff had the drive failed before the memory caused problems.

Rans6.....

[Saab Dastard]

Hard Page Faults are not an indication that there is a problem with the RAM (other than there's not enough of it).

A hard fault occurs when the address in memory of part of a running program is no longer in main memory (RAM), but has been swapped out to the paging file.
When the program next requires the contents of those memory addresses, they have to be read from the hard drive, which is many times slower than RAM access.

Apart from a lack of RAM, this can also be caused by a paging file that's too small, or fragmented, or split over several disks where each segment is relatively small.

High disk utilisation also means high CPU utilisation, due to the number of hardware interrupts required to service the disk I/O - normally these are "hidden" in task manager, hence the difference between the CPU values that you are seeing.

Not to say that your HDD isn't failing, although chkdsk is probably a better indicator of HDD health than Task Manager.

SD

[dastocks]

Check the automatic update settings - I now run my Vista machine with Windows update switched off because it was chewing up vast amounts of CPU and RAM to no effect.

[jimjim1]

I now run my Vista machine with Windows update switched off because it was chewing up vast amounts of CPU

I had to do that on an otherwise decent enough Win 7 machine recently.


Re the original question.

I would try creating a new user. Reboot machine and log on as new user. Check performance. If resolved copy/move files from old user to new one.

I have done this a few times with success.


Also check OS integrity with:-

Run the following in an "administrator" command window

sfc /scannow

If unfixable errors are reported you will then need:

Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth
redo sfc /scannow

(Obviously? you need to be on the Internet to get the Online bit to work:-)


If errors still reported the OS is corrupt and will need to be re-installed.


Good luck.

[andytug]

Best quick speed up for Vista is to disable disk indexing, it hammers the hard drive constantly to no good effect.

start, search, services, scroll down to Windows Search Service, right click, Stop. Once it's done, right click again, properties, set to Disabled in the drop down box. OK and watch it speed up.

[IBMJunkman]

Just tried the sfc /scannow It found some things it said it could not fix. I booted into Safe Mode Command Line and ran again. No errors.

In non-Safe Mode it appears some files are owned and cannot be replaced.

[CaptOveur]

BTW, the /Online switch for DISM has nothing to do with networking. It specifies that you want to take action against the currently running OS instance, rather than a .wim file that's been mounted.

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/dism-global-options-for-command-line-syntax

Also, as Vista is now out of extended support and therefore not receiving any further security updates, it's not something you'd want on a network anyway!

[rans6andrew]

Thanks for your guidance various. I went in to the machine when nothing except the OS was running. I started the task manager and then tried to turn off all Windows updates. At this point there was task manager, control panel and the update on/off windows open. It pretty much locked up with 100's of hard memory errors reporting. Eventually it let me close the task manager but the CPU was maxed out and the errors kept coming. This went on for nearly an hour before the errors suddenly went to 0, CPU usage went to 2% and then the on/off window closed. I switched to Admin and ran the disk surface scan. This went through in a few minutes and found no issues. It didn't show the memory errors or high CPU usage so I am still confused. I then did a defrag, took not very long as it has been kept tidy by regular manual running. I still suspect some memory issue is plaguing the system.

I tried, but failed, to understand and find the necessary settings to turn off the indexing. I did "start, search, services" but "Windows Search Service" didn't appear in the vast list.

I will run some memory tests tomorrow and also try gloogoo for more/other Vista index stopping instructions.

I'm getting there.

Rans6....................

[rans6andrew]

The memory test showed no issues. I was in safe mode at the time. The machine is doing things in a much more reasonable time than I am used to so it is clearly happier in safe mode than normal mode by a huge margin.

I then thought it might be a good idea to remove all the stuff I don't think I need from the start menu. I got rid of dropbox no problem but when I try to delete anything else it reports Windows Installer can't be accessed or faulty. Not sure what to do about this.

How do I get out of safe mode and back to normal? I went through the F8 boot modes and selected "normal mode" but it still boots up with a black background and reduced display resolution (big icons of few pixels etc). I don't know if it is normal full mode but screwed display parameters or still in safe mode.

I'll play some more later.

Rans6...................