PC extremely slow...please help

ncs22

Hi. Lately my PC has been very sluggish and slow at times. I have Windows XP Home SP3. My laptop is an HP Pavilion dv4000, about 5 years old. The slowness often starts happening very soon after I boot up my PC, or after coming out of Stand-By mode. This sluggishness can last up to a half-hour at a time. During the sluggishness, the light on my computer which indicates that the Hard Drive is spinning is lit up constantly. Out of curiosity, I opened up the Task Manager the last time I had a "slowness" attack. I'm not a computer expert, but one thing I noticed that was different (from when the computer is operating at a normal speed) was that the "CPU Usage" and "System Idle Process CPU" were fluctuating quite a bit. I noticed a rough pattern whereby as the CPU Usage went up, the System Idle Process CPU went down, and vice-versa. Actually, I could sort of make a rough estimate that the CPU Usage = 100% - System Idle Process CPU. Also, during these attacks of sluggishness, no other process seemed to be the cause of it (as evidenced in the Task Manager by the low or non-existent CPU usage of these other processes). Here are a few examples of symptoms that occur when the computer is slow: nothing happens when I click on something (or it does but it takes forever); when I close certain windows, the window sort of "peels" downwards very slowly instead of just disappearing instantaneously; the cursor does not follow the movement of the mousepad very nimbly; certain online-scans just abort midway through (like the online Secunia OSI scan). To try to help this situation, I have so far run Avira Antivirus, MalwareBytes AntiMalware, and Trend Micro HouseCall Online Scanner (all came back negative). Also, I defragmented my Hard Drive, ran Norton WinDoctor, and cleaned out my registry with ToniArts Easycleaner (also, I tried running the online Secunia OSI scan in order to make sure all programs on my computer were up-to-date, but as I said before, it can't complete a scan).

This is really affecting my productivity on my computer...I'd really appreciate anybody's help with this...thanks so much..

Cliff_Forster

ncs22 wrote:

Hi. Lately my PC has been very sluggish and slow at times. I have Windows XP Home SP3. My laptop is an HP Pavilion dv4000, about 5 years old. The slowness often starts happening very soon after I boot up my PC, or after coming out of Stand-By mode. This sluggishness can last up to a half-hour at a time. During the sluggishness, the light on my computer which indicates that the Hard Drive is spinning is lit up constantly. Out of curiosity, I opened up the Task Manager the last time I had a "slowness" attack. I'm not a computer expert, but one thing I noticed that was different (from when the computer is operating at a normal speed) was that the "CPU Usage" and "System Idle Process CPU" were fluctuating quite a bit. I noticed a rough pattern whereby as the CPU Usage went up, the System Idle Process CPU went down, and vice-versa. Actually, I could sort of make a rough estimate that the CPU Usage = 100% - System Idle Process CPU. Also, during these attacks of sluggishness, no other process seemed to be the cause of it (as evidenced in the Task Manager by the low or non-existent CPU usage of these other processes). Here are a few examples of symptoms that occur when the computer is slow: nothing happens when I click on something (or it does but it takes forever); when I close certain windows, the window sort of "peels" downwards very slowly instead of just disappearing instantaneously; the cursor does not follow the movement of the mousepad very nimbly; certain online-scans just abort midway through (like the online Secunia OSI scan)...

This is really affecting my productivity on my computer...I'd really appreciate anybody's help with this...thanks so much..

How much memory is your system allocating to SVCHOST.exe?

What do you think the likelyhood of a virus is? Either way, I'd run malwarebytes in safe mode just to make sure my system is scanning clean.

Service pack 3 has been known to enable a boat load of useless background services, a few of which are useless and are huge memory hogs. The processor usage you often see is your systems page file churning away constantly, plug the memory leak, processor usage should improve.

ssdp is a fairly useless service, and if your SVCHost.exe is marked running at about 150 mb, I'd be willing to bet that service is driving your memory leak. Go to RUN, type services.msc, hit enter, look for ssdp listed and disable it, see if it helps.

ncs22

Thanks for your prompt reply, Mr. Forster. As far as the memory-allocation to svchost.exe, there are many possibilities, since that entry is listed multiple times in my Task Manager. Here is all of the relevant data (note that these data were taken during a time when my computer was acting at a normal speed):
224K (for User Name "SYSTEM")
108K ("LOCAL SERVICE")
1732K ("SYSTEM")
1140K ("LOCAL SERVICE")
1980K ("NETWORK SERVICE")
20972K ("SYSTEM")
1712 ("NETWORK SERVICE")
1164K ("SYSTEM")

I don't THINK that there is virus on my computer, just based on the results of the 3 scans that I did. But I will go ahead and do MBAM in Safe Mode as you suggested.

Also, since my svchost.exe entries all seemed to be well below 150 mb (as listed above), I did not disable the SSDP Discovery Service at this time...should I still do that?

It's almost impossible to take any sort of "therapeutic" approach when my computer is in the midst of a slowness-attack, so any such thing would have to be done at a time when the computer was operating normally (like, thankfully, this very moment). I guess the proof that any measure was successful would be that the sluggishness-episodes would never return..

Thanks very much...

Cliff_Forster

Still try disabling the SSDP Discovery Service. What I have seen happen is SSDP will start searching out of nowhere, run for a while, bog the system down, then, eventually shut off to then repeat the cycle. The common symptom is the hard drive will constantly grind as the system utilizes all its precious RAM. Common on systems running 512 mb or less.


Also, consider looking down the list for a few things that are not useful to you and disable them. There is a service for UPS management for example, totally worthless unless, your managing a UPS... for a laptop, your not.

If in doubt, leave it on, you can seriously bork your system if you go too crazy in there, but a few of those services are obviously completely useless and windows in its infinite wisdom runs them by default.

ncs22

I just disabled the SSDP...I hope this cures the problem for good. You mentioned that the SSDP sometimes becomes problematic on machines running 512 mb or less...my computer has 504 MB of RAM. Also, I'm pretty clueless when it comes to technical aspects of computers...as such, the listings in services.msc sort of flew right over my head. Are there any more listings that you are aware of in there that can be safely disabled? I was pretty much in doubt for all of them, so my perusal of the listings didn't accomplish much. That UPS entry was not listed there, however. I guess I should add that I use the computer for very basic stuff (my computer is not a major media-center or anything like that)....surfing the web (IE and Firefox), occassionally using MS Word...I have an antivirus (avira) and a firewall (sunbelt). Maybe this can help you determine what entries I can safely disable? (by the way, I just noticed something a little odd...not sure if it's related to the SSDP disabling or not: my wireless network connection became disabled just like that...so I had to right-click the wireless icon in the system-tray, and then click "View available wireless networks". I clicked on mine, and then it reconnected...cannot ever remember having to do that before..)

Thanks very much..

Cliff_Forster

I'm 99% sure your core issue is memory related. Windows XP has become bloated over years of updates. At the dawn of XP nobody ran more than 256 mb, 512 mb was an enthusiast machine, you thought for that OS it would be all anyone would ever need, and with some tweaking, it will still work fine. Your 504 mb listed is actually 512 mb with 8 mb allocated to your on board video buffer. Its an older hardware spec.

You have two options. You could invest in more RAM and install it fairly easily to get some breathing room and stop that page file from constantly grinding, or, you could tweak the system by shutting down all unnecessary start up applications and background services. Or, even better yet, you could do a little of both and get the system to really zing.

Well, there is a third option for the fearless, back up your files and install Linux. If I had my way, I'd take every single low spec machine struggling to run a bloated XP, and pop Kubuntu on it.

But thats slightly off topic.

ncs22

Thanks for those 3 options, Mr. Forster, I appreciate it. I like the idea of more RAM..how do I do that?

And as for shutting down all unnecessary startup apps and background services, do I go to Run>Msconfig for that? (and could you help me with deciding what to nix, if I took this route?)

Finally, that option with Linux and Kubuntu is interesting...I'd never even heard of the latter. Maybe I'll go with one of the first 2 options to start out with (or maybe both of them, as you said), and then choose Linux or Kubuntu.

Thanks