I don't know if it is just bad luck or what but it is seriously pissing me off. I replaced their old system (PIII 866, 256Mb ram and 15Gb hard drive) with a newer system (1.5 Ghz P4 with 700-some odd megs ram and a 30Gb hard drive) this time last year and once again their new(er) system is just as slow. They do use Norton but it's been pretty well optimized so that it does not really bog the system down (and even with it not running the system is still slow) and of course their system is defragmented on a regular basis. It's just like the system is constantly accessing the hard drive even though it still has quite a bit in the way of resources and processing power. When I used that same drive I never had it running so slow but they managed to do it somehow. Is there any way I can track down what exactly is slowing this system down? For it's specs, it's running very slow. I have OLDER systems that run faster than it.
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Find Nedry!
Check the Vending machines!!
<----Computer says I need more beer. -
Re: Parents system running slow again
if its virus free, then check what's eating the ram(use task manager) because hdd thrashing indicates page file is used more than it should be.
also check size of temporary internet files folder if they use IE.
if it's big and full of files then it can be a problem.
oh yeah, to establish if virus is on it use tcpview: it shows all connections, and incase of infection you usually have unaccounted connections, tons of it.
(for example you're doing nothing and browser is off, and you have tons of connections listed)
today junkware has a purpose; to advertise, so it has symptoms too: badly written trojans that eat resources and phone home, and wherenot.
if you find such behaviour, then try malwarebytes anti malware or alike.
oh yeah, first thing i do when i see system with norton is uninstall it. -
Re: Parents system running slow again
Well it is nothing malicious as my parents do a good job at running the system spotless and the network activity is pretty good when idle (pretty much at nil). A reasonable quantity of ram is used by Bionic (I insist my dad not use it on his system as it uses so much ram) but usually there is 128Mb of free ram.
Wait a tic. Out of the ram I installed in the system, why is only 512Mb visible to windows?Find Nedry!
Check the Vending machines!!
<----Computer says I need more beer.Comment
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Re: Parents system running slow again
Replace ram with matched sets of good brands. No generics. Be careful with ram, especially for early P4 boards, may require 16 chips sticks see if you can get pair of 512MB or 1GB each. For 1GB or 2GB.
Cheers, WizardComment
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Re: Parents system running slow again
Is it running Windows 98? 512MB limit is a common issue with that OS. There's a fix but I'm not familiar with it.
It's also possible one of the DIMMs died, but unlikely. I had that happen once with some generic memory - one day I just noticed it was gone. But if that happened it won't show up at POST either.Comment
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Re: Parents system running slow again
Actually my parents run Windows XP home (we stopped using 98 two years ago) and the BIOS can see the ram but not Windows.
Also, while inspecting inside the case I found a bulging cap (was not there last year) over by the CPU VRM.
*sigh* Screw this. As soon as I get the money I'm buying my parents a new PC and installing XP on it. this thing is no longer worth working on.Find Nedry!
Check the Vending machines!!
<----Computer says I need more beer.Comment
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Re: Parents system running slow again
Check to make sure the hard drive is running in DMA mode and not PIO.
Go into device manager, under IDE controllers, then look at the properties for the port the drive is plugged into. Go to the advanced settings tab, and see what the "current transfer mode" is.
If windows XP detects too many soft read/write errors on the drive, it will gradually step down through the DMA modes until it gets to PIO, which is the slowest. That will cause the constant hard drive access.
In terms of the memory that's gone missing, make sure that it's all being detected in the BIOS first of all. Then, if the board is using onboard video, make sure it's not sucking up a bunch of memory. The memory that onboard video uses up won't be reported to the O/S as being installed in the system.Ludicrous gibs!
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Re: Parents system running slow again
Well the controllers are running at mode 4 UDMA so that is not the problem and since the system does not have integrated video (there is an AGP card) there should be nothing but the system susing the ram.Find Nedry!
Check the Vending machines!!
<----Computer says I need more beer.Comment
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Re: Parents system running slow again
i recently had a system where win reported less ram than it was in, and system was generally sluggish, also it had bsod stop errors.
it was bad ram.
so try what wizard suggested.
that's probably the main issue here.
offcourse badcap near cpu vrm is also not a good sign..hehComment
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Re: Parents system running slow again
regardless of the ram issue i'd make sure the swap file is large enough and set to a fixed size. a second hard disk (for the swap file) makes a big difference, too.
no matter how well it is configured i'd get rid of Norton. ASAP. it simply eats up unjustified amounts of resources, especially on an older system.
my personal opinion is that just an antivirus program (maybe a firewall) and a manual registry cleanup once in a while is all you need.
and keep in mind that any windows installation gets fubar after some time. (xp sooner than 2k, and using an admin account speeds it up, too.)"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." - H.L. MenckenComment
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Re: Parents system running slow again
As for the ram, try swapping the positions of the two sticks (i.e. ram in slot 1 moves to slot 2 and vice versa). Or you can boot the system with each stick separately and see if they both get detected right. Not sure if it could be related to the bulged cap you mentiond. But it seems like a fair system - personally I think it's worth recapping the bulging fellow.
Like many people here said, you should remove Norton. There are just better, free alternatives out there, like AVG Free, Avast, and Nod32. For firewall, I use Zone Alarm which isn't too heavy on resources and it's free as well.
Also, you can reduce the folder size for the Temporary Internet Files like i4004 said. 75MB is usually enough, even if your parents decide to watch YouTube a lot
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Finally, there's this little free program called CCleaner. I usually run it before shutting down my computer (cleaning out temporary internet files, index.dat files, history, etc.), but doing it once a month or so also works. So far my family's comp has been running since 2005-2006, and it hasn't slowed down at all, using all of the configurations I mentioned above.Last edited by momaka; 12-21-2008, 01:28 AM.Comment
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Re: Parents system running slow again
Given that the BIOS sees the ram, I don't see how that could be a hardware problem. Must be a Windows issue, but I don't know what specifically. I vaguely remember somebody posting about that happening with XP before.Comment
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Re: Parents system running slow again
You try and persuade my dad to switch from norton.
He has been using Symantic software since we got our first Windows 95 system in 1996. He trusts them and knows how to get the best performance you can get out of the software.Find Nedry!
Check the Vending machines!!
<----Computer says I need more beer.Comment
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Re: Parents system running slow again
I also know how to get the best performance out of symantec software. I go to "add and remove software" and I remove the damned thing.
All jokes aside, I understand your predicament. Once someone gets used to work with something, It's quite difficult to make him change his workflow. There's an "engineer" at work that recommended me to stop using shift-delete to delete files while at work, because that way I have another chance to recover the files if I make a mistake. Do I need to tell you how I delete files nowadays?Last edited by jpdoe; 12-21-2008, 07:32 AM.Comment
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Re: Parents system running slow again
>Given that the BIOS sees the ram, I don't see how that could be a hardware problem.
what bios sees is rsather irrelevant once os starts to load the ram etc.
also, ram usually fails erratically, it's not like it's on or off....some parts of it work, others not, sometimes it all works, next second half of it doesn't, etc.
so no, ram is not exact science, and bios reporting everything doesn't mean much...Comment
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Re: Parents system running slow again
drag and drop into the bin?"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." - H.L. MenckenComment
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Re: Parents system running slow again
Under load it'll become unstable, sure, but I've never seen a module that's visible at POST but disappears into the void before the OS can catch it. Not saying it's impossible, but I have doubts. Seems more likely that there's something goofy going on in Windows to restrict the address space.Originally posted by i4004
I'm not sure precisely how Windows detects the memory size. But my guess is that you'd query a BIOS interrupt. This page suggests that to be the correct method:
http://wiki.osdev.org/How_Do_I_Deter..._Amount_Of_RAM
If so, then whatever the BIOS sees is what the OS should detect when it loads. However the OS might decide to turn off blocks of memory it thinks are corrupt. I'm not aware of Windows being smart enough to do this but maybe it is.
Anyway, memtest86 should clear up if it's a windows vs hardware problem.Comment
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Re: Parents system running slow again
>All jokes aside, I understand your predicament. Once someone gets used to work with something, It's quite difficult to make him change his workflow. There's an "engineer" at work that recommended me to stop using shift-delete to delete files while at work, because that way I have another chance to recover the files if I make a mistake. Do I need to tell you how I delete files nowadays?
but how does that apply to antivir software that runs in the background and nobody is ever _really_ using it.
convincing dad?
well give 'em few thread like this to read
http://www.thepcspy.com/read/what_re...windows_down/5
or av tests like this
http://www.av-comparatives.org/seite...se_2008_08.php
where essentially free avs beat norton, which is not free.
and offcourse, if speed is ok for your dad, why touch it at all?
it's his machine.
tip to go to recycle bin first is a good one: surely you can't say that it never happened that with shift-del you erased something you shouldn't of?Comment
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Re: Parents system running slow again
>Under load it'll become unstable, sure, but I've never seen a module that's visible at POST but disappears into the void before the OS can catch it. Not saying it's impossible, but I have doubts. Seems more likely that there's something goofy going on in Windows to restrict the address space.
not whole ram but part of it.
pentiuam never said if his bios sees it or not, and even if he did it's wouldn't be very godo paramter of ram state:
ram fails under load, and is bios loading it?
i wouldn't say so.
yes, memtest or alike is a good idea.
removing norton too.
<wink>
something else: i think xp can get clogged in a same way win98 can.
it's a treat of ms consumer grade operating systems.
offcourse, if everything is ok xp will get clogged much later than 98, and with some carefullness and proper functioning hardware you won't really have to be worried too much.
if pentium wants to troubleshoot this, he should risft check, ram, as without it its guessing game "is it hardware, is it software" etc.Last edited by i4004; 12-21-2008, 10:23 AM.Comment
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Re: Parents system running slow again
Why is the parents not helping with footing the cost of a computer rebuild?
Should go with Asus board (P35 or P45), C2D E5200 (of course inexpensive but good video card like Radeon Sapphire series, crucial for memory and good PSU.
Cheers, WizardComment
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