Computer Acting Real Slow [Possibly HDD Problem?]

I just recently arrived in my country to spend the holidays with my family. They had been telling me about their pc moving slowly for quite some time. I tested it out and well yes everything is taking ages to load, even simple pictures in the Windows Xp viewer takes about 8 seconds to show. Loading Firefox is the same thing... It takes about 15 seconds for it to get to load. I´m familiar with their pc and this is´nt how it used to be. They have a Intel Celeron D 2.53ghz Processor with 760mb of ram. There is no way this pc can be this slow. I know this pc fairly well. It´s better than my pc... So I know it should act faster...

I checked the smart staus of the hdd through Everest and everything seems to be fine with all values passing. I checked to see how many running processes are and it´s the usual 36 or 38 that most pcs have when you turn it on. I checked the registry and the startup entries and everything seems to be in order with no surprises. I´ve also scanned the pc for malware, greyware, spyware, adaware, and virus but there is nothing wrong.

I´m very savvy about computers, and I can´t seem to sum it down to the problem. I really believe its the hard drive... It´s got to be... What do you guys think?

Things are expensive in this country so if I buy some new parts for it I have to be sure. It´s not like back home in the states where pc parts will cost you a dime.

Please help it´s for my parents pc and this is our only means of communication when I get back home since we chat on msn and talk through webcam.

 

Check in Device Manager, make sure that the HDD controllers are using DMA 4-6.

 

That was one of the first things I checked when I got here, and it´s set to DMA 5. I had thought it was in PIO mode but it isn´t...

 

Windows swapfile corrupt, missing or badly fragmented?

 

Hmm excellent suggestion... The pagefile could be corrupt... I doubt it but it´s a possibility. I have defragmented this pc already and it doesn´t make any drastic change.

 

I was referring to the possibility that the swapfile was fragmented as being a possible contender for the slowness

Sysinternals

Full Sysintenals toolkit here at MG's.

 

A friend of mine created a new admin account and worked with that and the performance increase 'was amazing', his words. Of course you may have to reinstall some programs.

You mentioned the HDD, is it working very hard when you call something up? You have plenty of room on the HDD? You can always run the maker's utility like WD's Data Lifeguard to test it for sure. Just some random thoughts.

 

Well see I forgot to mention this... A couple of months ago they told me they were running out of space on their hard drive. It´s a 40gb hard drive... I told them to turn off SYSTEM RESTORE in order to get a few GBS back in space. When I came here I noticed they only had about 1GB of free hdd space. I deleted about 12gb worth of garbage and it improved things a tiny bit but all in all the pc is´nt even half as fast as it once was. I opened the case and there is little to no dust.

Thanks for the tip Satrow I´ll check SYSINTERNALS tool.

Hmm Auggie ít´s a Seagate drive... Know of any tools for that?

 

Just a quickie: boot into Safe Mode, and see if things speed up noticeably: if so, then some 3rd-party programs are the culprits - if not, then there's likely a Windows-related or hardware problem...

You might also check the size of your swapfile: if there's not enough free space on your hard drive, you might very well be having pagefile space or defrag problems...

 

Seatools for Seagate.

 

Thanks Auggie...

Hey the pagefile was seriously small! I just checked it... I dunno how I missed that. It was set to 372-744 max size! I guess maybe Windows made the pc create a smaller pagefile when they began to lose hdd space, since they were coming under 1gb of free space on their hdd. Well I just set the pagefile to allow Windows to predetermine the size instead of the personal limit it was set to. Let´s see how this fairs for the next half an hour. I should notice a difference by than. If not than it´s something else.

 

XP sets swap at 1.5 X total installed RAM. It should have gone back to normal size automatically after you got rid of 12GB.:confused I have a good feeling about the results.

 

Thanks a lot friends after all of your suggestions I as able to determine that the problem at hand wasn't hardware related at all. Windows XP was basically damaged... I had to reinstall everything from scratch using the restoration partition of their hard drive.

Thanks a lot all is well now... Minus the fact that I've spend over a day reinstalling everything from scratch.

 

Glad you got it, superstar - live and learn... :wine

 

I wondered where you went ^^ pleased you got it sorted .