Slowed to a crawl/Stop start up programs? 3

[jlockley]

XP right now is on its knees. Good AV and Malware protection, firewall. Housecall shows nothing. Have run disk check (nothing), defrag. Still dragging.

I don't think it's malware, but possibly an update that is going down the wrong way. Before I start removing updates and finally wipe and upgrade to W7, I'd like to try a few things.
Mostly that would be stopping startup items I can't seem to get at through the usual (msconfig, ini files, start up items in Start folder)
Among the files that insist on starting up or running processes when I don't want them are Cardscan, Skype, NeatReceipts.
Is there a way to block them aside from removing the programs from the drive?

 

[Lemon13]

That is a very handy tool by sysinternals (microsoft) and should help you out

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx

M. Knorr

MCSE, MCTS, MCSA, CCNA

 

[Lemon13]

this one too

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

M. Knorr

MCSE, MCTS, MCSA, CCNA

 

[jlockley]

Thanks. Great.
I am also wondering after viewing a few processes, if the culprit might be Firefox. I've got it running lean, but it was doing strange things last week and seems to be sucking up a lot of system resources.

 

[edfair]

You can stop stuff in taskmanager to see if it is the problem.

Indexing services are significant users of resources at startup. So are AV updates and scans.

In task manager look at the cPU time of the different processes for stuff taking up cycles and at the memory changes for things that are paging into and out of the swap file. You may need to search the web to find what the different processes are tied into or use find in regedit.

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

 

[kjv1611]

jlockley,

What kind of hardware do you have installed? Reason I'm asking is that if it's older hardware, it'll be brought to its knees easier than the newer stuff.

Also, as edfair mentioned, any indexing programs can make a severe performance hit. I'd suggest disabling or uninstalling Windows Search 4 if you've installed that. It runs horribly on many XP machines... or at least it used to. It seems to be running fine on my system at work now. When I first had it, the system had 2GB Ram, and I'd see a noticeable difference. Oh, that system had a Pentium 4D processor as well.

My current system has an Intel Celeron CPU (Core 2 Architecture, though) and 4GB of Ram. This newer (not really new) system screams compared to the old one! Windows Search 4 doesn't even make a dent.

Other indexing systems could be the very system indexer built into windows (if you disable the indexing service, that'll zap that one), and Google Desktop. I've seen it cause big performance hits on some machines as well. Of course, I stay away from that one, personally, just because of the security issues they had when it first came out. Just gave me the heebie-geebies.

 

[goombawaho]

If there's no other explanation (malware, malfunctioning or dieing hard drive) - think about PIO mode. Look it up and see if your system's hard drive is in PIO mode vs. DMA.

 

[jlockley]

Thanks all. KJV, It's C2d, about two years old, don't know the details by heart. 4GB. I'm not up for a new system at the moment - more the time to assemble one than the cost.
I'll check out uninstalling the search and indexing. One issue is that a number of programs which demonstrably slow start up, at least, don't seem to be uninstallable. For one Neat Receipts, which doesn't even show in add/remove programs and cannot be stopped with the usual methods.

This is a non gaming, non media (to the extent that that's possible) office workhorse with programs like the corel suite, Paradox, Candscan, MS Office Pro, etc. Totally boring stuff. When I say slow, I mean it takes half a minute for a Word document to load or two minutes for Outlook to kick in. Typing outstripped entry. That kind of stuff.

This was very sudden, which would indicate equipment failure (none found) or hijack. (checked with a fine tooth comb - none)

Memory checks out, no issues I can see on power supply.

Edfair, I had already checked Task Manager, and found nothing out of the ordinary, except the programs I don't want. TM refused to let me stop a few of them, with the annoying "you may need to log on as admin" nonsense (I AM THE admin, and was logged on as such.. thanks MS team.)

I cleaned up the C partition and now have 11GB rather than 5GB free, which has been somewhat effective. I plan to migrate some of the programs over to a less populated space. (All Data is kept on a separate drive).

I haven't tried that tool yet - it downloaded to the wrong place, but that's also next on the list.

I'll keep you all informed.

 

[kjv1611]

By all means, your hardware and the symptoms don't match up. So something is definitely wrong.

You could try a couple of cleanup programs if not done or mentioned already:
Advanced System Care
Glary Utilities
CCleaner

http://www.download.com

I've used all 3 on many systems, without a single issue.

Another one you can use (since I think you said this was XP) is RegScrubXP - look at

http://www.majorgeeks.com

for it. It has worked wonders for me in the past.

But here's another option altogether different. This would help test for it being hardware (other than the hard drive): Download, boot from CD, and run Ubuntu Linux - just don't install it. See how things perform from the CD as compared to your Windows install. The first part goes a little slow until it gets to you actually seeing the desktop (current version of Ubuntu), but once you get to that point, it's really fast. It will slow a little when you access things that are on the CD, and not loaded into RAM, of course.

Here's another thought - try starting in safe mode. If it seems to perform MUCH better in safe mode, then I'm still gonna say I suspect some suspicious software somewhere. Whether it's malicious, badly coded, or just damaged, something would be wrong.

And another thing to check - the BIOS - to see what the CPU temps look like.

goombawaho already mentioned to check the PIO vs DMA mode of the hard drive.

Well, enough rambling from me.

Let us know what else you try, and what else you find.

 

[goombawaho]

For the next steps: I vote for my suggestion first, then safe mode, then booting from bootable CD.

 

[jlockley]

Thank you KJV.

I downloaded Glary Utitilities, and it's a nifty little tool, although for my purposes the sysinternals tool is better. I took a flyer and let it do a registry cleaning (Since there is a restore option) with the only negative so far that Clipmate can't find it's scanner. CD is in the drawer. No biggie.
(And there's a copy of Windows7 waiting for a fresh install, if everything goes to Hell in a handcart.)

Otherwise, the computer seems to be running faster. It's hard to tell if it is slower than before. Certainly the stopped programs have quit dragging on it.

 

[jlockley]

Thanks for the POI/DMA information. The drives are in DMA (2-4)mode. At least not POI.

Also some collateral damage is the loss of scanner connectivity or recognition. (two - carscan and a cannoscan), so reboot and see what happens there.