Dell desktop Running Way slow

[OKnewguy]

I hope to pick everyones brains about a frustrating computer problem.
About a week ago my desktop started acting like it had a virus or something. If I bring up task manager it hovers around 96 to 100% cpu usage.
I had not reformated in a couple of years, but it had been acting really well up to this point.
I ran spybot, avg, adaware, defraged, disc clean up and maybe some other things that I can not think of off the top of my head.
So after this trouble shooting I then thougt I might still have some kind of bug, so I moved everything to my spare hard drive, and then reformated.
I then got it all back up to date, put avg back on (but not zone alarm yet), and it still ran like a snail. I then questioned my ram, I have 2 512's, and swapped them with some that my brother has (also a gig) and there was no change. I am usually the tech guy that all of my friends and family go to for help, but this is really kicking my backside. Am I having a processor problem? How would I check that? Any other ideas.
Thanks for any and all help.
Dave

Computer specs
Dell Demension 2350 (with xp)
1.7 gig processor
1 gig of ram.

 

[JayC]

You said you moved everything from your HDD to another one and then you got it back up and running. Could it be possible that copying stuff from your backups you moved the problem right back onto the new format? Did you try doing the scans and stuff from Safe Mode? I would also recommending the use of HijackThis. It will find the issue, but the catch is it looks at a lot of files and does not distinguish between bad and good files. There are forums that will look at the report HijackThis generates and will tell what's good or not. You can use Google to find a forum that may help. I wish I knew of one, but I never had to use a forum.

Trend Micro HijackThis - Free software downloads and reviews - CNET Download.com

 

[czechsonofagun]

I would start with The home of Spybot-S&D!.

My $0.02

 

[OKnewguy]

Thanks for the quick replies, I currently to not have the 2nd drive even hooked up. I wanted to make sure that something from that drive might mess things up, just like you were thinking. I did run spy bot search and destroy. I will check out high jack.
Thanks, Dave

 

[Dmace]

When you open task manager and see it running high (90%+), click on the processes tab and then click on the size Mem Usage title twice so that it is sorted from highest to lowest in usage. See what process is using the most memory and then do a Google search to find out what it is. Some will stick out like explorer.exe or taskmgr.exe which obviously cannot be ended. I bet you have some processes from an Antivirus or other program sucking down your available memory. One big one is RTVScan.exe that runs from Symantec Anti-virus and is a memory hog.

Secondly, go to the Performance tab of the task manager and look under the "Physical Memory (K)" table to see the total available RAM. My laptop has 512MB of RAM so it reads "523496". Now look at the Peak Commit Charge and see if that number is higher than your total physical memory. Mine reads 319868 so the computer has plenty of RAM for the programs I run. If the peak is higher than your total then you need more RAM. When your computer runs out of RAM it uses hard drive space, the problem is that accessing the hard drive is about 10,000 times slower than accessing the RAM. No exaggeration, real numbers. RAM is cheap and easy to install, it's the best performance per dollar upgrade available if neccessary.

Also, install and run this program (Glary Utilities | Glarysoft) it is one of the best resource tools out.

 

[Willl]

I had not reformated in a couple of years

Maybe it's time.
Afraid to say, but at some point ya got to say that your time is worth more than this and just format the B%*$@.

Oops, did I say that last part out loud ?

 

[OKnewguy]

I am still checking out hijack. I just played around with glary, seems pretty cool. This seems to always be the case, but you always have to have multiple scans from different programs, adaware, spybot, and now glary. They all find different problems (btw, none of them have found any virusus or even spyware, just tracking cookies). I DID reformat, which has always, made any computer I use run like a bat out of ****. So far, it seems like I-explore, is the bigest hog, followed by avg. I have checked all of the process, and all of them are supposedly legit, and should not be deleted, but why do 5 svchost.exe run. They usually are not big hogs, but they do add up. Btw, the physical memory and commit charge seem to jive, the commit (which if I understand right is how much memory the task should take) is less then 1/3 of the physical. What are we missing?
Thanks guys, Dave

 

[Willl]

Ya I noticed I got a bunch of 'svchost.exe' running also.

"I-explore"....yuck.

 

[OKnewguy]

Willl, I also have firefox, and it will peg it out just IE.
Dave

 

[EastTexFrank]

This happened to me a few months back. I have 1GB of RAM and it got to where it was waaaayyyy slow. One culprit was Norton Anti-Virus but the main reason, after a lot of searching, was that my APC battery back-up had failed. It appeared to be working, the green light was on, etc., but it wasn't protecting anything. The software on the computer was trying to communicate with the back-ups and was eating up more and more RAM in the effort. It didn't give me any error messages or any indication that something was wrong. Once I disconnected the faulty UPS the CPU usage dropped to less than 20%. Strange.....

Give it a try and see if it works for you.

 

[dgl24087]

What is svchost.exe And Why Is It Running? :: the How-To Geek

 

[slewisma]

Have you checked all the setup settings in the BIOS (usually get there with F1 or similar during bootup) and all the power management settings in Control Panel?

The battery that saves those settings may have given up the ghost and anything from clock speed to hard drive interface settings like DMA may have shifted from fast to something else.

Hard drive could also be dying. Did you do a low level format and / or full scan of the drive?

 

[OKnewguy]

Hey gang, I have been so busy today, I did not really have the time to get on this snail and check things out. I wondered is svchost was a heading for multiple windows operations. In that link it had some examples of a dozen svchost running, luckily mine has never been like that. Thanks for that link.
Bios diagnostic:
It has been awhile since since I had to diagnose anything that deep, like the hard drive or the battery (you were refering to the cmos right) are there simple ways to check these and the clock speed? At this point I really have a feeling that the problem is hardware related. On the reformat, I deleted all partitions and let window create the proper partition in the reformat process. Did that answer your reformat question?
Thanks ganag, Dave
Btw, I was a a/v tech guy at a large church back a while ago, I was pretty savy in 98 and 2000, but around xp time the church was growing to mega church status and we started hiring IT guys. I still consider myself varily savy but have forgoten some of these deep things.

 

[OKnewguy]

One thought: on the battery, my clock has remained consistent. Does the clock auto update off the internet or something? I do not know, but just thinking out loud. I know in the past I have had computer throw a prompt during startup that say the cmos was faulty. Is there another way to check?
Thanks again, Dave

 

[OKnewguy]

I went and ran a program called cpuid, I think all of the specs look right, it shows my core speed at 1.694mhz (on a 1.7gig machine), the multiplier at x17, the bus speed at 99.7mhz and the fsb at 398.7mhz. It also provides a bunch of other info, but all of this looks right, right?
Thanks, Dave

 

[KPark]

You mentioned that the cpu utilization was very high. You can find out what is using all those cpu cycles in Task Manager. Just go to the processes tab and click on the heading called CPU, and then click on it again (that will sort it in descending order). The biggest CPU hog will be at the top.
-IF- the CPU utilization doesn't point the way to a solution you may want to temporarily disconnect the ribbon cable to your CDROM/DVD. The reason is that if anything on the drive "chain" is having a problem it will affect performance for all disk access.
Some handy tools are available at Microsoft - They bought Sysinternals, and that includes Mark Russinovich (sp?), who made most of those utilities. The ones you are looking for are "Process Explorer" (used in place of Task Manager), and "Autoruns" (for selectively shutting off things in your startup, and more, without having to delete them). The utilities are free and invaluable. Hope that helps. I don't think the amount of memory is a problem... just the amount of CPU that is being used.

 

[slewisma]

One thought: on the battery, my clock has remained consistent. Does the clock auto update off the internet or something? I do not know, but just thinking out loud. I know in the past I have had computer throw a prompt during startup that say the cmos was faulty. Is there another way to check?
Thanks again, Dave

Out of the box or freshly re-installed, the clock wouldn't be configured to get the time anywhere but from the computer itself so your theory that the battery must be okay if the clock is accurate seems pretty sound.

On the disk format question, usually when you re-format the disk, you are asked if you want to do a low level format or if you want to do a full scan of the disk sectors or something along these lines. Checks every sector on the drive by writing and reading back and marks bad sectors as bad so they don't get used. If there were a lot of bad sectors identified in this process, you'd have an indication of a dying drive.

 

[Hakim]

Check to see if "indexing" is turned on in Windows. That will slow things to a crawl. That is the first thing I turn off whenever I get a new system.

Open Windows Explorer, go to My Computer. Highlight the drive, and right click. It will bring up a tabbed window. Select "General" and at the bottom of the screen is a check box for "Allow indexing..." Uncheck that. If you really need fast searching use Google Desktop or another utility. Windows indexing service is just horrible. If you have more than one drive, shut off indexing for them as well.

You may also want to just go ahead and get 2 more gigs of ram. You need it these days. It will make a big difference in operational speed.

Hakim

 

[RobJ]

Secondly, go to the Performance tab of the task manager and look under the "Physical Memory (K)" table to see the total available RAM. My laptop has 512MB of RAM so it reads "523496". Now look at the Peak Commit Charge and see if that number is higher than your total physical memory. Mine reads 319868 so the computer has plenty of RAM for the programs I run. If the peak is higher than your total then you need more RAM. When your computer runs out of RAM it uses hard drive space, the problem is that accessing the hard drive is about 10,000 times slower than accessing the RAM. No exaggeration, real numbers. RAM is cheap and easy to install, it's the best performance per dollar upgrade available if neccessary.

Actually when the total commit gets to half of the total physical some swapping out to disk will occur. Just over doesn't mean it's a deadly thing. I have 2 kids running 512k and playing all sorts of crap. My sons desktop is still a P3 although he uses his laptop more these days.

Being a 1.7 its an older Dell. I'd look at the hard drive, check the speed. You want at least a 7200rpm. If it's a 40 gig it may or may not be a 7200rpm. If it's less than 40 gig, probably less.

If you plan on keeping it, I'd go with a new 80gig hard drive (about $50), then install windows. Easy on a Dell WITH the Dell XP CD. The software key is on the chip. That old I'll guess your CD is a SP1 or SP1a. If you can get your hands on a Dell sp2 use it. Then do nothing but put on SP3. Check your memory and speed. Ok or not. Then check carefully until you are good to go or install something that causes a problem. Straight windows XP only uses about 180k on the commit memory. If you have a gig of ram you are good to go unless you are running a ton of programs at once.

Good Luck,
Rob

 

[RobJ]

On the disk format question, usually when you re-format the disk, you are asked if you want to do a low level format or if you want to do a full scan of the disk sectors or something along these lines. Checks every sector on the drive by writing and reading back and marks bad sectors as bad so they don't get used. If there were a lot of bad sectors identified in this process, you'd have an indication of a dying drive.

On the XP blue install screen there are 2 options, Full Format or Quick Format.