What yoyodyne said.
Windows Search installed itself on my XP-pro machine during an automatic update, about 3 weeks ago, and it is a major hog, constantly searching my hard drives. I’ve been turning it off every day at some point. Ought to just deinstall or disable it, but I’ve been too lazy to figure out how so far.
It puts a magnifying glass icon in my tooltray, but if I ‘exit’ that it is still running in the background. I have to go kill it. It shows under ‘processes’ as WindowsSearch.exe
This is what I was going to say. I started having performance problems on my Toshiba laptop maybe five-six months ago. Two months ago, the hard drive crashed and burned.
If you’re not backing everything up to an external USB drive or otherwise, start. Today.
You should be able to do it in Add/Remove Programs.
Cervaise (and others):
I do need to back my data up. Since I’ve never really done it before (I know, I know!), I have to clarify: when you say “everything,” do you mean all of my programs/settings/etc.? Or just my personal files? I guess the answer to that is “whatever I don’t want to lose,” but I’m asking what people typically do.
Also, I got home really late last night, so I wasn’t able to take much time to deal with the laptop, but I did blast the fans with compressed air, and that seems to have helped at least a little. We’ll se what happens when I try to multitable again.
On to other responses (all of which have been very helpful, so thanks everyone!) after I finish some urgent work.
If the problem is not hardware, wiping and re-installing Windows from your restore disks will pretty much restore your system to as-new condition. I generally do a complete rebuild of Windows at least every two years to clean out the moss that accumulates as I install and uninstall software, etc. It’s free, so it’s worth a try.
I also concur with the recommendation to add RAM. However, if you replace the hard drive and add RAM, you may be bumping the cost up to the point where you should think about replacing.
I actually got a new Dell Latitude through my work a few months ago, but I like the Vaio so much better! The keyboard for the Vaio is far better suited to my gigantic hands, and the touchpad is much more smoothly responsive. (And the keyboard doesn’t have that stupid mouse-button between the G and the H that causes me to accidentally relocate the cursor on the screen when I’m typing quickly.) The Vaio’s damn heavy, I’ll give it that, but otherwise I’d prefer to fix it rather than get another one.
I’ll add RAM and back up all my data, but I won’t replace the hard drive. If that goes, I’ll get a new machine. Really don’t seem to be any performance issues other than the slowness, however.
Your HD is partitioned into C: and D: correct?
How much space is actually left in your C: partition?
Sometimes the windows footprint will grow and grow with XP updates so that your OS can outgrow it’s original living space.
Yes, memory can have heat issues. Larger density sticks will run hotter than lower ones, generally (depending on the devices used on the module).
However, I bought new memory for a laptop from Newegg, and one stick out of the pair came in bad. Try removing one stick, and seeing if the problem goes away. If it doesn’t, swap sticks to see if the other is the problem.
For what it’s worth, based on the same “tiny uncomfortable keyboard” considerations, I picked this up after the above-mentioned hard drive failure (my previous machine was nine years old and needed to be replaced). I like it a lot; a few little quirks but definitely a solid machine.
are you getting “virtual memory too low” errors?
Whether you back something up is determined by how easy it would be to recover by other means. For example, you must back up “My Documents” or whatever you’re using as the equivalent, because the stuff saved there is unique. However, you don’t need to back up C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 or whatever it is on your machine, because you can get it elsewhere. You may or may not want to back up individual folders under C:\Program Files, based on whether or not the things you have installed can be found elsewhere. Freeware programs, easily downloadable? Don’t need to back up. Other programs for which you have the CD? Don’t need to back up. Older programs you installed a while back and don’t know where to find? If you have the install binaries saved on the C: drive, back those up for sure. If you don’t, back up the program folder and hope you don’t need a DLL. And so on. One thing I always back up because it’s easy to forget: the fonts folder under system. I can go get those fonts again, or drop them onto a new machine off CD-ROM, but it takes a lot more time to pick through download sites or fifteen CDs than simply to copy the set of TrueType etc files I’ve already decided were useful.
This, of course, can turn into a lot of piecemeal work. If you have a backup utility, you can granularize your backup scheme; once you’ve identified everything you want copied off, you can launch that backup routine quickly, but it may take a couple of hours to get everything set up. Some people just say screw it and drag the whole C: drive onto the external drive, trusting that if they need something they’ll pick through the image to find it. Either way works fine; it’s about where you want to sink your time. You either spend the hours up front, and create an efficient backup you don’t have to search through later (and that copies more quickly); or you do a quick-and-dirty drag-and-drop up front, without having to think about it, and then wait for several hours for the copy to complete and take the risk of having to spend a lot more time later finding whatever it is you’re looking for. Your choice.
Keweenaw:
I want to say that C: has about 2 gigs of space left on it, while D: has about 16 gigs of free space. (I’ve tried to be diligent in putting any new programs – and my downloaded music and stuff – on the D: drive, but I’m not sure how/whether to transfer some of the out-of-the-box programs off of C: to free some space there.) How can I tell whether the Windows footprint has outgrown the partition?
pantheon:
No, I don’t think I ever have.
Thanks for the laptop suggestion, Cervaise, and the advice about the intricacies of backing things up.
Replies to everyone else in a bit.
Is there anything of interest in the event logs? Look for anything with a red icon beside it.
Also, in Task Manager, check the Performance tab and look at the boxes under the graphs to compare the memory in use with that actually present (bottom left vs top right IIRC).
Beyond that, have you upgraded or installed anything recently? In particular, have you upgraded to Office 2007?
2 gig should be enough. You’ll start getting HD full warnings usually if you get close. If you were actually able get though a defrag on that partition, then it’s probably not a space issue. How big is the C: partition ?
So, did you try anything that worked? I have been experiencing a similar problem.
How old was your laptop, Cervaise? Is there an “average lifespan” for your typical laptop hard drive? Any idea what causes them to deteriorate?
I’d vote for this before anything else. Overheating tends to creep up on you as diminished performance over time, it doesn’t make it fall off a cliff and you can ID heat issues in that the fan runs all the time. If this isn’t happening malware is the most likely suspect.
This has worked well for me
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Also remove the ram utility and let windows set your virtual space
Whoa! 2gigs on your C?
Keep in mind that defragging is highly inefficient if your HD is over 50% full. Before you try anything too drastic, try offloading as much non-system data as possible to an external HD. Also, try using a defragger like Diskeeper instead of the Windows default.
Do a search on google for performance issues related to the Windows restore/backup program. As time goes on, I’ve heard that the automatic backup will gradually eat up VAST amounts of your HD from the background. There should be tweaks out there to help.