The laptop my wife uses has suddenly become very slow to load web pages and just seems to run slow. I have run several virus detection programs on it and it doesn’t appear to have any viruses or spyware. It is very similar to the laptop I am working on right now and the speed between the two is night and day–so I am at a loss to what is causing the slowness on her computer. Her computer is an surplus computer from my office that is the next generation down from the one I am working on.
It is a IBM Thinkpad and was working fine until awhile ago. I tried to use the IBM diagnostics on the computer and it runs all the tests until it gets to the memory test and then 60% into the test it hangs up. All the previous tests on other components run fine.
I am wondering if I replace the DIMM in the computer with a new one that will solve the problem? This is a second computer and I don’t want to order new memory if that isn’t going to really solve the problem.
Uh, have you tried the obvious thing of cleaning out the browser cache, cookies, and history? My browser occasionally gets slow, and doing this fixes the performance problem.
If Mangetout’s and jharvey’s excellent answers don’t help, check out tools like TuneUp Utilities that help you “maximize” your system by clearing caches, fixing registry errors and turning of un-needed utilities and features.
And of course - check your hard drive to make sure you have ample free space. If you start getting in to the “megabytes free” stages, it’s time to clean up.
thanks!
unfortunately none of these seemed to do the trick.
No memory issue
Already had deleted all that stuff like history, etc
Ran Tune-up utilities and no issues—but a cool program!
Now am running a bunch of spyware detection programs such as SpyBot and Adaware, and others
basically it seems to me now that perhaps it is more of a spyware thing since it really is the browser that is super slow and when you open a new window it is super small and only opens fully when it is finally completely loaded. Also it seems to keep knocking out the google ad blocker
but thanks for all your help—Dopers are the best !
Anyways, how much memory does your system have? If you are willing, please provide me with a list of the processes that are currently running. If not, just compare yours to mine and figure out the ones you can disable at startup.
Process PID CPU Description Company Name Private Bytes Peak Private Bytes
System Idle Process 0 53.70 0 K 0 K
Interrupts n/a Hardware Interrupts 0 K 0 K
DPCs n/a Deferred Procedure Calls 0 K 0 K
System 4 0 K 0 K
smss.exe 924 Windows NT Session Manager Microsoft Corporation 164 K 1,672 K
csrss.exe 1108 Client Server Runtime Process Microsoft Corporation 1,444 K 1,616 K
winlogon.exe 1176 Windows NT Logon Application Microsoft Corporation 5,864 K 9,180 K
services.exe 1220 4.63 Services and Controller app Microsoft Corporation 1,976 K 2,048 K
svchost.exe 1424 Generic Host Process for Win32 Services Microsoft Corporation 1,388 K 1,428 K
spoolsv.exe 1920 Spooler SubSystem App Microsoft Corporation 3,044 K 3,944 K
DefWatch.exe 128 Virus Definition Daemon Symantec Corporation 524 K 564 K
SavRoam.exe 196 SAVRoam symantec 1,460 K 1,544 K
alg.exe 544 Application Layer Gateway Service Microsoft Corporation 1,124 K 1,140 K
svchost.exe 2016 Generic Host Process for Win32 Services Microsoft Corporation 2,368 K 2,464 K
lsass.exe 1232 LSA Shell (Export Version) Microsoft Corporation 2,228 K 2,684 K
explorer.exe 252 2.78 Windows Explorer Microsoft Corporation 16,620 K 20,432 K
VPTray.exe 668 Symantec AntiVirus Symantec Corporation 2,524 K 2,556 K
You should also try downloading a different browser. It could be that some update to IE (or whatever you are using) doesn’t like your computer. With a different browser, that might fix it (or at least it would let you know that that is the problem.)
For what is is worth–I personally thought it was good advice–because I thought it was a memory issue. Now I know it is not, so I can look for other things.
Alterego I will compare what I have when I get home later tonight and see what the difference is. I did check the memory before and there wasn’t any big surprises. My gut sense is that it is something now like a virus or a glitch in IE as suggested by Sage Rat.
Jurph I ran all those programs and found a ton of stuff–but no cure all. Still slow and still opens up a small window and IE hangs for several seconds. Then it seems to click into place and everything runs fine–albiet a bit slow.
again thanks for all the advice–I will look at this again tonight when I get home. Luckily we have a few other computers to play with at home
I suppose on reflection, a memory fault that only caused slowdowns, without crashes and freezes, would be fairly unusual (although I think I’ve seen it before).
There are other possible causes beyond malware, but I’m not sure that possibility has been eliminated yet - if you run HijackThis, you could copy and paste the log here and we might be able to spot something amiss.
I had a problem like that on my desktop. It was also very slow to change between two open browser windows. I updated the video driver and that fixed everything up.
Logfile of HijackThis v1.99.1
Scan saved at 7:31:29 PM, on 1/30/2007
Platform: Windows XP (WinNT 5.01.2600)
MSIE: Internet Explorer v6.00 (6.00.2600.0000)
Bingo!!
we have a winner–downloaded Firefox and my wife says it is running like a charm.
However Mangetout if you see anything on that HiJack file I would appreciate your looking at it.
