So, Friday afternoon we had the Storm of the Century. (Actually, in my little part of the world, Storm of the Every Other Week this time of year.) Wind, half-dollar sized hail, torrential rain, tornadoes too close for comfort*. Before the Big Blow even hit, I experienced intermittent power outages (my computer was turned on at the time). In the past, this was no big deal: on restart, the computer would fix itself while it glared at me.
Not so today. While Windows 2000 loads and I can get to the desktop, it wasn’t until an hour ago that I could get any application to launch. Menus are painfully slow, clickable links aren’t, etc. Firefox still won’t launch - I am posting with Internet Explorer. Task Manager tells me that something is using 100% of my CPU, and the HD LED keeps blinking**.
When I try to run the built in disk repair, I get a message that it can’t get exclusive access, so I set it to run on restart. Three times so far. No apparent help.
Anybody have the slighest idea what is going on? Hosed Windows? Is there any way to determine what is trying to access the HD? Or might this be an indication of imminent HD failure? I don’t know what triggers the LED: HD activity or CPU requests.
*Check out tornadovideos.net. I don’t want one of those effers within 50 miles of me. But I regularly do.
**The SOB is putting on a light show as I preview this - and I’m not doing anything but reading.
The LED is a hard drive indicator. Never used 2000, but assuming task manager is similar to XP look under the processes tab and look at the CPU column. You should be able to see what process is taking up the CPU. Sometimes it may not be super clear what program the process corresponds too, but you can right click on it and end the process.
Have you performed virus check and malware scan? This is probably your first step, boot into safe mode if necessary to get this done.
A lot of hard drive access often indicates a problem with your ram. Have you checked to make sure your computer is still recognizing its full compliment of RAM.
Likewise, you just might not have enough RAM to start with and need to add some more. My five-year-old PC slowed to a crawl a couple of months ago for no apparent reason. I finally figured out that some new software I had installed must have pushed it past the tipping point where I just had too much stuff loading on startup and there wasn’t enough RAM left for normal operation. I added a couple of GB (up from the half a gig a started with) and the difference was like night and day.
boot into safe mode by pressing f8 during bootup. This will load a minimum configuration on your system. Check to see if you are still having issues, report back.
>You should be able to see what process is taking up the CPU. Sometimes it may not be super clear what program the process corresponds too, but you can right click on it and end the process.
Often, you can web search the name of the process and find out what program or service it belongs to, and even why it may hog the CPU or what the pros and cons of killing it are.
I’ve got the same problem of excessive HD access, with horribly slow function. But I’ve mitigated it somewhat by increasing my virtual memory to its maximum of 999 MB.
If the maximum is only 999 MB then your disk must be nearly full. Set your page file to 2 GB or more. But if your machine is hitting the page file significantly, you should purchase more memory.
Heh. I’m running a pentium 4 from 2002, at 2.6 GHz, with a 73 GB HD that still has 17 GB free, but only has 240 MB of RAM. I need a whole new computer!
How do I adjust my page file setting? And would it do any good?
Increasing the page file only helps if your physical memory is used up, since your computer will favour putting things in physical memory as opposed to virtual memory.
You mentioned that these problems started as a result of the storm, not because of any new programs.
Because of that one fact alone, I would suggest you back up your important data immediately.
After that, do as Jorge_Burrito says, reboot into safe mode, and see if the hard drive stops cranking as much.
No safe mode: Blue screen of death, “IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL”
Task Manager said that the CPU hog was “avgrsx.exe”. I ran that through Google, and it seems that there were complaints about performance when AVG 8.x was introduced. So I uninstalled AVG 8.5, intending to reinstall 7.5 if the problem was solved. It was not.
I thought I’d shut off my D drive to eliminate it as the source of the problem, so I shut it off in BIOS setup. I didn’t bother to unplug it because I didn’t think I would need to. Excessive disk access eliminated. And the D drive and all its files are still accessible.
Problem 98% eliminated. It looks like most of applications launch normally, with the exception of Firefox and Spybot. I already reinstalled Firefox once, maybe I’ll try it once more with feeling. Same with Spybot.
The upshot is that it appears that my original problem is resolved, but dang if I know what went wrong and how it was fixed.
No, you just need more memory. All the updates to XP that MS have put out have increased its basic memory footprint considerably. Plus you’ve likely loaded a load of stuff - antivirus etc - which just sits there in the background. With 240 MB I’m guessing that you actually have 256 MB and have a shared memory video card which is using 16 MB.
One of my PCs is a P4 2.4 GHz which runs fine, because it has 2 GB of memory.
Control Panel | System | Advanced | Performance, and it’s in there IIRC. It won’t do you any good at the moment.
I finally got Firefox to launch, and there we went again with the constant disk access. It seems like as long as I don’t try to launch Firefox or Spybot, I’m fine, but otherwise I’m frakked.
Really pulling my hair out now. I can’t imagine how power interruptions could cause the problems I’m having.
