We’ve turned off quite an assortment of startup items in msconfig, killed off processes in the task manager, and rebooted, and with nothing running except the DSL connection the task manager doohickey reports 100% CPU usage.
She says it performs like something is eating up processor cycles, too. It becomes unresponsive at random times, often requiring her to force-quit an application and restart it. Typically, she’ll have open Eudora, WordPro, Internet Explorer, FileMaker Pro; sometimes also Lotus 123; sometimes also Microsoft Word. But that’s it. It’s not like she’s running Bryce, Photoshop, AutoCAD, SPSS, and SETI@home or anything. She’s got half a gig of RAM, a half-empty C drive, and a D drive (to which the swap file is set, btw) the size of the Pacific Ocean and 99% empty. WTF?
I’ve reached my Mac-centric limits as far as knowing what to suggest for performance issues on a PC.
The task manager has a tab that shows individual processes and the CPU time and memory that they are using. Which process is the CPU hog?
The “unresponsive at various times” sounds like some kind of network thing, as if it were looking for something over a non-existent network neighborhood.
The computer is only six months’ old. Virus scan was running constantly via a real-time virus scan (PC-Cillin) until just tonight when I disabled that (thinking maybe that was what was eating up the processor cycles?); plus we’ve done manual checks now and then.
Dear God, please tell me she should not be expected to format the damn thing once every six months?!! She’ll throw it out the window and buy a typewriter! Personally I think she’ll use it until it needs to be reformatted, then replace it.
Finagle, I’ll get back to you on that as soon as I have a chance to peek at it. Which parameter do I look at to determine process-hogification? CPU time? Memory? Both?
When you disable everything (and I do mean EVERYTHING) in msconfig, including systray, does anything come back after apply/reboot? If it does, what is the name of that process? (The Klez worm typically does this.)
You didn’t mention the Windows version, but this could be useful – I assume XP?
You’ll be looking for the process that takes up the most “CPU” (cycles, basically; CPU time, I believe, measures how long a process has been running). Odds are it will be a memory hog too, but then a lot of Windows programs use a lot of RAM.
How unresponsive is it? It can be Windows thrashing the virtual memory file. If that is the case, move the virtual file to another drive, defrag C:, and move it back. Don’t forget to set both max and min file size to the same value (2 - 2 1/2 RAM)
My WAG is that she needs more RAM; with WinXP the more RAM you have the better.
It could actually be a hardware problem: is her motherboard supportive of that large a processor? Is her power supply working correctly? What are her typical system and CPU temperatures?
I had the same problem and it turned out to be insufficient cooling. Advice I’ve had from professionals also indicates that faulty power supplies are often the first suspect.
I have a program called taskinfo98 (yeah, it’s that old…), but it does exactly what I want: It shows a list of running processes and how much CPU “time” they are taking.
Also: Micro$oft Word is a CPU and Memory hog. When I’m forced to use it on my lowly 166Mhz machine here, I make sure I’m not online, and have everything else closed. I know IE requires a lot of CPU attention as well. I’m not sure about the rest.
Or, could it be a bug in the Task Manager?
You shouldn’t have to reformat the HD. DeFrag, maybe.
At work I have a 1Gig Pentium with 512K of memory, and it too was running like poo. I opened the sucker up, and found that it only had a piss-poor onboard video driver. I work at very high resolution, so I changed my screen colour depth to “High Color” from “True Color” and bada bing, it went up to expected speeds immediately. Maybe this is the problem?
I am running a 1800XP with 512MB RAM and WIN98SE and the computer does the same thing ocassionally. It works fine most of the time but randomly and infrequently it will almost freeze and does not respond. I make a few clicks and nothing. A few seconds later all the clicks do what they were supposed to do, they were not lost.
I am not sure about the cause but I have noticed several things which "jam"the computer. Since I installed WIN98SE the hard disk must go into a nap and takes a while to wake up when it is needed. Also, if accessing the CDROM and there is some trouble it just freezes there. You need to eject the CDROM and then it tells you there is trouble, but not before.
Still, I do not think this is the direct cause of the sudden momentary freezes. I do not think it is a RAM issue as my other computer runs fine with 64 MB.