suddenly slow XP machine -- software or hardware?

From: Chris (ijkdc_at_spamfree.hotmail.com)
Date: 07/06/04 

Date: Mon, 05 Jul 2004 23:03:34 -0700

Hi there,
  My girlfriend's Gateway has been running horribly lately. It hasn't
been crashing but it is taking forever to do just about anything. It
didn't used to be like this. Launching applications takes forever and
the hour glass comes up.
        I have run Spybot S&D on it again recently and also did a full system
scan with Norton Anti-Virus (yuk!)and the latest defs. Found nothing.
But the thing practically crawls. It's a 300SE I believe. 1.4Ghz
Celeron. It has 256MB RAM and a decent amount of free disk space. I
opened up Task Manager and whenever it's taking its sweet time to do
something, the processor usage is pegged. It seems like it's either the
app or System Idle Process eating up all the cycles. I've also checked
the system logs and don't notice anything unusual.
        The only things I can think of are a possible hardware problem or
Norton. I wouldn't rule out either of them. I have found NAV to be a
horribly written piece of software. It often has "internal errors" and
"must close" and LiveUpdate never works -- I'm stuck downloading the
update manually. I've seen this on several computers. The Gateway
hasn't exactly seemed like a high-quality piece of equipment to me
either. At one point it would crash and then fail on the next boot and
subsequent boots until you let it sit off for several hours. I wasn't
never able to locate the problem due to the transient nature of the
failures.
        Anyone have an idea as to what could be causing this? I think my next
step will be to disable Norton's on-access scanning and see if that
makes any difference.

Any help would be appreciated!

-Chris

Relevant Pages

  • Re: networking crash suddenly in my home LAN
    ... If this is working from the gateway then I would presume that the ... valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever ... 91.102.231.32/28 dev eth2 proto kernel scope link src 91.102.231.33 ...
    (Debian-User)
  • Re: FASTER PERFORMANCE
    ... When I said forever, I mean, it's like a minute or two for some programs. ... You really need more RAM. ... how much CPU time is being used when the system ... NOTE - "System Idle process" is not a program! ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • SUPER openSUSE on old computer (Pentium MMX 200 mHZ!)
    ... I currently have SuSE 7.2 on my old Pentium MMX 200mHZ Gateway ... If I click on "software" it (again, after waiting about ... forever) tells me there's about a zillion dependencies that are missing. ...
    (alt.os.linux.suse)
  • Re: suddenly slow XP machine -- software or hardware?
    ... > My girlfriend's Gateway has been running horribly lately. ... > been crashing but it is taking forever to do just about anything. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Windows Task Manager.......can someone advise on how to interpert the information?
    ... For Physical Memory I understand Total and Available but what does ... Sometimes when I run a program, the program seems to take forever to ... do its thing, YET, when I check the Windows Task Manager, under ... System Idle Process be so high if the computer is dragging? ...
    (alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt)