Win XP crawling
 

Something I have been hacking at for several months now, and I am no closer. Win XP SP3 1GB Ram (but it happened with SP2).

Just occasionally, for no apparent reason, I get a 'lock-up', during which I cannot effect any changes. I cannot even bring up Task Manager. When eventually I can (and I occasionally then get the 14 instances I have called for:ugh:) there seems to be now't adrift. Commit 430'ish out of 1gb' ish, system idle taking 99%, just the odd flicker of another sys process.

The system then runs fine with no hiccups. Plentiful checks with various AVs eg Trend, Avast, + CCcleaner + Reg cleaner show nothing. Nothing particularly 'notable' in 'hijack this' and no scans scheduled to run at the time. It could be happening ONLY when I am running IE6, but I am not 100% convinced (Yes, I know - but I need it for a few sites)

Any ideas where to look? Obviously the tedious disabling of services/reboot blah blah would be one idea but I wonder if anyone had any better ideas?

I had that Captain.

I got over it with one or two hits of System Restore. Don't know what hell it was but it was a pain - but it came good.

Won't do any harm unless you have downloaded something, but you can always do it again.

Go on, you know it makes sense.

Hi Pop - only flaw in that is that the 'condition' goes back well before my earliest 'restore' option, so I don't think I would gain anything, sadly.:{

You could try Firefox3 with the IE tab extension added to the add-on list, no need to run IE6 at all then, just open those sites from FF using a right click on the favourite and selecting "open in IE tab"

I recall having that sort of problem with the Java RTE, which is around 100MB. Whenever it was opened - usually by a browser (for obvious reasons), it would be virus checked by the on-access virus checker (Sophos in my case).

This would instantly consume 100% CPU and stop everything dead in its tracks until the check was complete.

I simply added the Java RTE files to the "ignore" list on the AV sweeper and not had the problem since.

This was most obvious on the single-core PCs, as dual core always had the other to continue with (but I still added the JRE files to ignore list!).

If you can run with Task Manager permanently in the background, you might be able to switch to it to see the culprit.

SD

gg- that's a nice one! I had the add-on installed but confess to not believing it would 'hoodwink' things like MS Exchange server:ok: How do I get it to remember login username/password? I have 'remember p/w' box ticked.

SD - thanks for that idea - I've listed the Java folder so we'll see - or should I just have excluded a particular file or two?

Are you still experiencing occasional slow response from this server eg refresh here and there?

This has me thinking that there's a disk-related bottleneck, since you say CPU usage remains low. Is there plenty of space on the disk (at least 10%, pref 20%), and I suggest doing a defrag "analyze" to see if the disk needs defragmenting. A fragmented swapfile can be a major drag on a system.

bnt - I thought that too a while back and have defragged a bit since - the puzzle, though, is the 'occasional' nature of the slowdown.

I think SD is onto the likely area of culpritism. The occasional nature suggests an heavy duty bit of scanning going on. Having the taskmanager running will point the way. Have the taskmanager set to show the max cpu at the top. This is usually in the high nineties for "system idle process", as you've spotted. Next time the freeze happens, bring taskmanager up, see if you can see what's maxing the CPU.

Has been tried, Tarq - the major stumbling block is that when it 'freezes' taskmanager goes on holiday too.......... setting it 'on top' is a pain as even with it dragged down to min it gets in the way. There appears to be nothing 'unexpected' popping up on the processes.

Maybe the best bet, as a troubleshoot, would be to leave taskmanager on top, so it's viewable all the time. Bit of a PITA if it takes a while to do it again, though.
If you use Avast as your AV, make sure the providers are set to "standard" rather than "thorough". I've read a few reports of having them - particularly the standard shield- set too high can cause this.
Also with Avast updating, which can briefly haul large amounts of resource - up to 30% - try setting it to notify rather than automatic.

I thiink I had most of that covered. Prelim results of taking Java folder out of Avast watch ok, and I have seen a brief flash of something javaesque in TM too.Would like to know if I DO need the whole folder isolated, though, or just specific files?

On a linked topic, roughly how many svchost.exes should I expect to see?

I've got 6 running on my system at the moment

8 right now - thanks for the reassurance! I see from Google up to 12 is not unusual.

I have 5 running right now.

As to freezing, my 'Out of memory at Line 56' thread below identified the culprit as Adobe Flashplayer 9. Version 10 fixed it. Could this be worth a shot?

Cheers
mcdhu

Saw your thread, thanks, but I am already on 10 like you (due to the kerfuffle with Youtube on t'other thread.)

I know it can be a pain, but Gordon the Geek, my computer guru, suggests that the easiest way is to do a re-install of Windows. He tells me that he reinstalls Windows about once every six months. He has methods of saving preferences, etc, which makes the re-install process a lot less painful.

Despite help, once my computer starts backing up, I've never found a method of fixing it, other than reinstall. I know that, after several inadvertent misadventures, and slowdowns similar to your own, it's like a breath of fresh air being able to really motor again afterwards!

Also, of course, check that you have sufficient RAM on your existing set-up.

Yes, Tosh - I think I hold a 'Masters' in reinstalling Bill G***s products, and I really would like to avoid! So far initial impressions are ok. Tell G the G thanks.

I assume there's nothing showing in the Event Viewer?

Mine occasionally surprises me by actually telling me what the problem is!

Nothing untoward, there, Keef (and I DO remember to look occasionally:)). The only other 'suspect' I have is Kservice which I understand to be a BBC Iplayer 'peer-to-peer' module which rather worryingly seems to do it own thing. I also killed that at the same time as the Java exclusion, so who knows? Will get round to gingerly resetting each one in turn soon. Only 'slow' pages are still PPrune every now and then (as ever).