I have been struggling with my boss’s laptop for a while now, and I am getting frustrated.
He is running Windows XP on a Dell Precision M4400, and about once a month, it decides to become incredibly slow. Screen refreshes are slow, startup is slow, loading webpages is slow, sometimes just typing is slow. I’ve cleared out pretty much all Startup items, we’ve scanned for spyware/adware/virus issues, I’ve run hijackthis (comes back clean) and have never come up with a good source for the problem.
He was convinced that if he takes it off of his dock, reboots it, then resets it on the dock it usually “fixes” it, but today he has tried that several times and it has not made any difference… and in the past, I’ll clean what I can on it, and then it will just start working again, only to begin with the slow operation again in 3-4 weeks. I’m pretty sure that any of my “fixes” and his dock removal solution have just coincided with the computer deciding to get with it and start running correctly.
Has anybody else ever had an experience like this, and if so, were you able to resolve it? How?
You need to look at Task Manager during these times of slowness to see what is running.
Right-click on the clock and choose “Task Manager” then go to the Processes tab. Click on the CPU heading to sort by CPU usage and click on Mem Usage to sort by memory usage. See what’s using what.
Make sure “show processes from all users” is checked, too.
I get this, and Task Manager reveals nothing: highest memory usage is from System Idle, and there’s nothing taxing the CPU.
After a bit of observation, I reckon it’s Outlook (2003) causing the problem, though I don’t know how it manages it. But it only occurs when that bloated piece of shit is open.
Often it’s disk I/O that is getting maxed out, and Task Manager is not much good for detecting that (try the Process Explorer utility instead). Other times, it’s some vital process waiting for a timeout from something else. Windows seems very fond of waiting, oh, 30 seconds before it accepts that a certain resource really isn’t there.
System is really system idle, meaning the free memory, should be most of the time near 90% or more depending on what background bunk is running.
Several things come to mind by experience:
hardware brownouts, W$ will keep trying to address a malfunctioning graphic card, memory, HD, or network resource etc, without showing much to justify itself. Real hardware problems will show up in “process explorer” IRQ and DPC calls, network problems are more difficult (maybe someone here has a good tool or method)
indexers, from W$ Restore to Google desktop, Windows Search, etc, even Picasa can be terribly painful, especially in combination with a faulty HD or network connection
Antivirus programs, a bugged update or something of the sort can upset your machine, trying to complete or validate a foiled download.
Check disk space, and defragmentation (AND settings) you did not specify if the machine was noisy or silent when slowing down, but a monthly programmed defrag would do it
check any planned actions, inside W$ and any other background running AV, disc managers, updates.
Good luck anyway, catching that sort of bug is feindish, I’ve had a system seize because I unplugged a graphic tablet, one month later! W$ suddenly decided to look for it.
You can certainly look in the Configuration Panel/Hardware manager, check for anything flagged in yellow or red
System and System Idle Process are not the same thing. But it could indeed be a driver problem. Something’s wrong if System is at 60% much of the time,anyway. The OP might enable the Image Path Name column in Task Manager (View->Select Columns…) to make sure that this “System” is the real one, c:\windows\system32
toskrnl, and not some impostor.
I have the same problem on occasion, so I tried loading the task manager. It took a couple minutes to come up and when it did, the slowness was over and there was nothing to see. Someone suggested it is virtual memory, so I try to minimize the number of running programs. It may help.