Do Well-Maintained PC's Become Slow Over Time?

[deepgrewal22]

I am well versed on computer upgrades, maintenance, and repair. I have a Pentium IV 1.60GHz with 1.2GB of RAM (Windows XP Media Center 2005) which I have owned since 2001. Over the years, I have swapped out practically all original hardware with newer units (CD/DVD +/-RW Drive, HDD, RAM, Video Card) without any problems.

I usually format the hard drive and reinstall (from a Ghost image or clean install) everything every 1.0 - 1.5 years. I apply updates and patches as they are available. I realize that the CPU is only clocked at 1.60GHz, so I don't purchase newer bulkier software. My computer's specs are more than enough for all of the software I run.

Lately, I have noticed that the computer is not as fast as it once used to be. Having more than a few application running at one time now causes it to perform very slowly. (Yes, I have effective virus and malware protection). I work in IT and have checked for any sort of unwanted programs or adverse behavior so I know that there aren't any issues there.

SO HERE'S THE QUESTION
Does the motherboard and other hardware (RAM) actually become slower over time regardless of how well it is maintained? I didn't used to think so, what do you think?

Deep Grewal
"Microsoft Works" - oxymoron

 

[edfair]

No, the hardware pretty much maintains speed. There might be slight drift with the clocks, but not enough you would be able to notice.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[electronicsfreak]

My advice would be get a power supply tester or a card to test and see if anything is going wrong with the board.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16815158065

As something could be dying.

There is a point in wisdom and knowledge that when you reach it, you exceed what is considered possible - Jason Schoon

 

[stduc]

Actually I suspect the drop in performance you are noticing is due in part to all the microsoft patches and in part to your anti-virus and anti-malware software which has got more CPU hungry over time.

Adding a bit more RAM may help.

A simple, though tedious check would be to disconnect the machine from the internet and re-install from scratch and test your apps before applying any updates or installing the anti-virus and anti-malware software. I strongly suspect the machine would appear to be the fastest it has ever been.

The main reasons any given machine slows down over time are.

Software bloat.
Registry bloat - it never shrinks!
O/S gets bloated with patches.
Drive fragmentation. Even if you defrag regularly - files become further apart as you add/remove/update. So even if individual files are not fragmented there is more drive head movement required over time.
So although you can take action to mitigate the slow down. After a few re-installs you have no real choice but to buy a new machine.

A couple of things I have found make a big difference.

Restrict the O/S to a small (30 gig say) partition and don't use that partition (C) for data.

Set up your own fixed size page file. This prevents page file fragmentation which slows windows down dramatically.

[navy]When I married "Miss Right" I didn't realise her first name was 'always'. LOL[/navy]

 

[Nelviticus]

All of the above comments are valid but it could also be down to a failing hard drive. If Windows detects more than a handful of errors on a drive it will drop the access mode - and thus the speed - down. As this will affect the page file access it will have the effect of slowing everything down.

Go into 'Device Manager', expand 'IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers', right-click 'Primary IDE Channel' and select the 'Advanced Settings' tab. Transfer mode should be set to 'DMA if available' - if it's set to PIO that means that Windows has dropped it down due to drive errors (either that or the drive doesn't support DMA, which is unlikely unless it's ancient).

(Thanks to BadBigBen for reminding me about that!)

Regards

Nelviticus

 

[stduc]

Good point.

[navy]Nelviticus [/navy]if it's set to PIO that means that Windows has dropped it down due to drive errors (either that or the drive doesn't support DMA, which is unlikely unless it's ancient).

But just to clarify - XP reports both transfer mode and current transfer mode. It's current transfer mode that's important and if requested is DMA and current is PIO then the HDD, controller or cable have issue(s).

If you have these symptoms, try a new cable first. Then I would recommend Spinrite (from grc.com) and get it to reports the health of the drive. But generally speaking - if the drive is unhealthy, or suspected of being unhealthy then replace it.

[navy]When I married "Miss Right" I didn't realise her first name was 'always'. LOL[/navy]

 

[cdogg]

It appears that "Deep" has replaced the HDD at least once from his post, so it shouldn't be ancient. If it were stuck in PIO mode, you'd notice that in a heartbeat. It wouldn't be just slow, it would be crawling.

However, to add to the list above, the hard drive wears down after just a two-three years of normal use. Although S.M.A.R.T. may not trip any failure notices, drives naturally get slower as they wear down even when they are years away from failing. I work on 4-5 workstations a day, and when upgrading, often the hard drive replacement makes the biggest diference.

I just wanted to point that out, although it may not apply in this situation. It only takes one bad software install or infection to cause a problem in Windows. So a clean install should always be your first move before replacing any hardware. Run tests before you install any 3rd-party programs or MS updates...

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Einstein
[tab][navy]For posting policies, click [/navy]here.

 

[kjv1611]

Also it could just be that you are using newer software now with the same old hardware. New software is really built for newer hardware. So, when you put it on older hardware (over top of older software). For instance, I have one customer who was wondering why their computer seemed so slow now compared to what it used to be. Well, she uses QuickBooks Pro, and she had upgraded to version 2007 when the slowness started happening. So, I upgraded her RAM from 512 to 1024, and reinstalled Windows, apps, etc to have a clean install. Also, she had been using a Wireless b network adapter, which I convinced her to change to just using wired 10/100 (since that is what her router supports - and it's in the same room).

That helped a ton, but it still wasn't just right. Then I did some checking regarding Quickbooks, and found (not to mention what I saw under processes on her machine) that Quickbooks 2007 REALLY eats up system resources! I mean that is one hungry program! So, I advised her that we could either build a new machine with newer hardware, and that could get her up to the performance she wants, or it was just going to be slow. I mean, sure I could have set her up a RAID configuration, or put her system on a Raptor hard drive, but all of that would mean more money, which I don't think she wanted to spend. The system was built around an Athlon 64 (not X2) processor back when those had been out maybe 6 months.

Also, I noticed that if she didn't run Quickbooks at all, everything else just zipped along just fine.

So, keep that in consideration: if you've upgraded any software - OS or apps - that could very well be the source for your speed degredation.

And there is of course the oh so terribly common cause of poor performance: malware/viruses. To check for those, you could use the following:

From

http://free.grisoft.com

AVG Antivirus FREE
AVG Antispyware FREE
AVG Antirootkit FREE

From

http://www.download.com

Ad-Aware 2007
Spybot Search and Destroy
Spywareblaster (doesn't work on Vista - at least not yet)

From

http://www.majorgeeks.com

RegscrubXP - only works on XP, and maybe 2000. This program may not be supported anymore, but I do get really good results from it. I've only had one problem, and that was about 2 or 3 years ago, at least. It wasn't major - just it messed up the "open with" setting for PDF files to where MS Journal viewer opened those files instead of Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Let us know what you find out...

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[Freestone]

Could the slowdown be a result of CPU throttling?

 

[Nelviticus]

I don't think the Pentium IV had automatic throttling, did it?

Nelviticus

 

[cdogg]

The mobile versions of the Pentium 4 did, but as far as I know the desktop versions never had it. It was either new in the Pentium D or the Core 2 Duo.

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Einstein
[tab][navy]For posting policies, click [/navy]here.

 

[deepgrewal22]

I purchased a new hard drive in March of this year, and performed a clean install of everything. My computer is virus and malware free as I am using an effective assortment of utilities:

Ad-Aware
SpyBot
Spyware Blaster
AVG

Also, I mentioned that I always check the System Requirements of any program that I install on my machine to make sure that my hardware resources are more than the minimum requirement. I have no need for the latest MS Office etc. I simply use the same versions I have been using that are tailored for the system requirements of my machine.



Deep Grewal
"Microsoft Works" - oxymoron

 

[kjv1611]

Just keep these things in mind:

1. Just because you have those programs installed does not mean you are free of any malware. You could also try a free online scan, such as

http://housecall.trendmicro.com

2. Just because your system meets the minimum requirements for a new application does not mean that the application will not cause the system to slow down. Newer programs are built generally on newer technologies built for newer hardware. Many of them will not affect performance noticeably on older hardware, but many will. All I am saying is that if you are wanting to find the solution this is yet one more possible avenue to check.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[Nelviticus]

You're seeing slow-downs so clearly something is amiss. New hard drives can start to fail, indeed there's a school of thought that says they're more likely to fail when they're new. I'd check the transfer mode just in case; you've nothing to lose but 30 seconds of your time.

Other things to check ... just racking my brains here ... maybe a Windows or other software update has caused a service to malfunction, so go into Administrative Tools and check Services to see whether any are listed as 'Starting', or have a Startup Type of 'Automatic' but aren't shown as 'Started'. Also have a look in Event Viewer as this can be a mine of information.

Regards

Nelviticus

 

[kjv1611]

Yeah, along the lines of some service or what not getting messed up, there's another option along those lines...

Be sure to look in the task manager to see if there is a process or two that is really eating up the memory/cpu cycles. For instance, I've seen a couple of programs get hung (after being closed), and they would keep my Athlon XP 3200+ machine running at 99% with the process until I ended that process.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[cdogg]

I purchased a new hard drive in March of this year, and performed a clean install of everything.

Was it slow right away, or did you just notice it recently?

Also, installing multiple spyware programs is good up to a point. Some combinations don't play well with each other. Personally, I only install Windows Defender (free Microsoft version) that updates on its own and stays resident in the background. Haven't seen any issues yet (knock on wood). So, you might want to try getting down to one spyware scanner (forget Ad-Aware - it's a waste), maybe the next time you do a clean install.

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Einstein
[tab][navy]For posting policies, click [/navy]here.

 

[deepgrewal22]

When I first bought and installed the HDD in March, things were running pretty quickly. Just lately I have noticed a slowing in speed.

Why is Ad-Aware not good? It has been highly recommended by many IT web sites and authorities for years.

Deep Grewal
"Microsoft Works" - oxymoron

 

[djsrc]

I hope that I am not sticking my finger in your ear, Deepgrewal, but how about something that cleans up your REGISTRY like:

3B Software's: "Windows Registry Reapair Pro"?

I would think that adding all those new pieces of hardware and software over time would begin to jam up the Registry with a lot of unecessary registry entries.

As I understand it, and I am certainly not a computer engineer, as you run hardware/software, the computer runs through the registry, over and over again, right?

Am I right about that?

So, if you have a lot of dead links in the Registry, it would effectively slow down the computer in general, after a while.

At an office I worked at that had an older computer with a CPU at your's speed, and that had a large number of various generations of programs loaded into it, it started to run really slowly after a while. Really slowly.

I ran that 3B program and was amazed that there were hundreds and hundreds of bad, dead end entries.

Anyway, that program also defragments the Registry after you clean it up, overall which I imagine must help improve performance.

If I am wrong about the Registry thing, someone please tell me, as I would appreciate knowing if I am correct about how that works.

Good luck!

 

[cdogg]

Why is Ad-Aware not good? It has been highly recommended by many IT web sites and authorities for years.

More like highly "advertised" over the years. Ad-Aware is better than nothing, but certainly not better than others on the market. eTrust PestPatrol and Spybot have consistently scored higher marks in magazines I've read (such as MaximumPC). And in my "own" experience trying to clean out infected PC's, Ad-aware does the worst job of the three.

It's best to trust reviews from a well-known magazine than a website where it's possible product manufacturers have some investment. That turns some into a form of advertising...

When I first bought and installed the HDD in March, things were running pretty quickly.

I would go with this. That is even more reason why a clean install now will probably clear things up. Something has happened on the "software" side most likely to cause the slowness.

I know it will cost you time, but on the upside, you can be smart about it this time around. Once you get Windows and your programs installed and configured just the way you like it, make an image using a program like Acronis TrueImage, Ghost, or DriveClone. That way if anything happens down the road, you have something to quickly get back to assuming your hardware hasn't changed. You can also make backups on a regular basis...

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Einstein
[tab][navy]For posting policies, click [/navy]here.

 

[djsrc]

I use the entire Computer Associates Suite of Pest Patrol (as recommended by cdogg), Firewall, and the AV program, (all of which I get for free as a Time Warner Cable customer, BTW).

At least as far as I am concerned, they seem to work trouble free, for the most part.

I realized after going nuts over it once, uh, twice, that you CANNOT have the Firewall program on, at all, if you want to run Call of Duty 2!

(Anyway, I let ACTIVISION know that it is the CA Firewall that jams up COD2, not the AV program, as they have mentioned in their FAQ's.)

Also, either the Firewall, or the Pest Patrol, appears to do some funky stuff with some download, or server access, or video enactment issues, but better to err on the side of caution...

Overall, good suite, and not expensive, if you have to pay for it.

Ad-Aware (Swedish company) doesn't support Win98SE anymore, if that's what anyone happens to still have.

(I do, on an older Compaq PIII 733, so that I can still play some of my fave Win98SE games that don't seem to work on later OS's.)

DJSRC