I dare you to solve my problem!

Recently I have had a strange problem arise. I have searched and scoured the internet for possible reason and solutions to my problem. So far I have found nothing useful. While I did find some people with similar afflictions, ultimately they arose out of different reasons. So I will first attempt to explain, to the best of my ability, the problem I have been plagued with, then I will post my specs, and finally I will post what I have attempted so far.

The Problem:
The problem has not be all that bad of a problem, more just an annoyance. Basically, something is wrong with the performance of my computer. I would describe it as sort of a "choppiness". I first noticed the problem less than a week ago. I was doing some housecleaning and turned on some music to listen to while I was cleaning. The music would not play smoothly and was all "choppy". I didnt think much of it, mostly just found it annoying. The next day when I went to use my computer, I noticed the problem again. This time in mouse movement. Instead of being able to move the mouse around and have the cursor navigate the page fluidly, it too was suffering from "choppy" movement. I found this annoying as well, so I restarted the computer. Upon this, I found the computer now restarted very slowly, spending a long time at the screen with the blue loading bar thing. The bar never froze in one spot or anything, just moved slower. Also, I now notice that programs take every so slightly longer to load.
Usually there is nothing noticeable when there is nothing being processed. When there is something busy being processed, then the problem really becomes noticeable because the mouse movement is quite "choppy".

Here are my specs:

It is a laptop, not even half a year old.
HP Pavilion dv5000
AMD Turion 64 Mobile Processor ML-37(2.0GHz)
1GB RAM
Windows XP Media Center Edition version 2002, service pack 2
120GB Hard Drive
ATI Radeon Xpress 200M 128MB

I think that is all the important stuff. If you need more info just let me know.


Everything I have tried so far:

I feel fairly certain that the problem did not originate from any virus, malware, etc. Nevertheless I did run some scans.
I ran my anti-virus scanner(Sophos), and there was nothing.
I ran Spybot Search and Destroy, and there was nothing.
I ran Adaware, and there was nothing.

I do use a firewall(ZoneAlarm)

I did not install anything new recently, but to be sure I uninstalled a bunch of unused programs, and other stuff.
I ran CCleaner.
I defragmented with Auslogics Disk Defrag.

After all this, the problem was still there. So now I am here for whatever advice people may have for me. I am starting to wonder if it might not be a hardware problem. Perhaps the hard drive is malfunctioning or something. The warranty is still good, so I might bring it in if no one can find a solution. I dont really want to do that because I need it for schoolwork, etc and I dont want to have to part with it for too long.
So hopefully somebody has some ideas of what to try next.
Thanks for your help,
Meow

PS I wasnt sure which category in the message boards this would fit under, so I just put it here.

 

As far as I know, the drivers should all be up to date. Startup items are looking good too. Any other suggestions?

 

I would suggest two things one go to a good online Malware scanner (Bitdefender) comes to mind and give you comp a full scan, you might be surprised at what your programs missed, next post your "Task Manager" showing the Processes that are running, something is obviously sucking up Proc time. Hope that Helps

 

I had the same problem a couple of months ago while updating DirectX. Finally I restored the PC from a previous restore point and everything ran OK.
Maybe you could fix your issue that way..

 

As I previously stated, the laptop is only about 5 months old. I recently did update many of the drivers. I ran CCleaner on the startup items and I looked over them in msconfig and found nothing suspicious.
I am running bitDefender online scan at the moment. I will post the results as well as the list of my processes when i get home from classes.

 

Well I ran the BitDefender online scan, but it found nothing.
Here is a process list:

Image name Mem Usage
alg.exe 4,452 K
ALMon.exe 908 K
ALsvc.exe 1,776 K
ati2evxx.exe 2,604 K
ati2evxx.exe 3,760 K
atiptaxx.exe 5,376 K
csrss.exe 4,636 K
ctfmon.exe 3,872 K
dllhost.exe 7,768K
eabservr.exe 10,248 K
ehmsas.exe 5,604K
ehrecvr.exe 5,572 K
ehSched.exe 6,116 K
ehtray.exe 4,456 K
explorer.exe 29,820 K
firefox.exe 63,004 K
HP Wireless Assistant.exe 10,272 K
hpqimzone.exe 16,676 K
HPQTOA~.EXE 7,188 K
hpqwmiex.exe 5,608 K
hpwuSchd2.exe 2,780 K
jusched.exe 2,364K
lsass.exe 1,484 K
LSSrvc.exe 2,660 K
mcrdsvc.exe 3,456 K
point32.exe 6,784 K
QPService.exe 5,832 K
SAVAdminService.exe 5,116 K
Savservice.exe 45,2484 K
services.exe 3,828 K
smss.exe 440 K
spoolsv.exe 9,400 K
svchost.exe 4,764 K
svchost.exe 5,448 K
svchost.exe 6,684 K
svchost.exe 5,740 K
svchost.exe 29,148 K
svchost.exe 3,952 K
svchost.exe 5,508 K
svchost.exe 4,752 K
SynTPEnh.exe 5,4832 K
System 236 K
System Idle Process 28 K
taskmgr.exe 21,828 K
vsmon.exe 24,760 K
winlogon.exe 2,872 K
wmiprvse.exe 6,448 K
zlclient.exe 7,668 K

 

Does the problem exist in safe mode? If not, then software is the culprit. Use msconfig to shut down all your start-up programs and all non-microsoft services & reboot. This essentially duplicates safe mode. If all seems well, then you can start adding services one at a time until the problem manifests itself. If all services become enabled & still no problem, start enabling start-up programs. You could be in for a lot of rebooting, but you should be able to find the cause of your issue.

 

I did system restore, and the problem has seemed to disappear. I hope that it does not reappear. So thanks for all the ideas. If anything resurfaces I will let you know. I am still curious as to what the problem could have been, because I can think of nothing that could have been the culprit.

 

Conflicts of allocated space in memory sometimes occur between drivers after an update. Better is to disable automatic update and and only accept security patches.. Anyway, glad that your problems seem to be fixed up.

 

I'll bet your virus scan was kicked off to scan your hard drive. While it does a full scan, it will hog resources like no other prog (Savservice.exe). Rtvscan (Norton antivirus), when kicked off on our XP machines, will cause systems to lull on desktops at my work until it's weekly full system scan is completed.
Rebooting before it is finished will cause it to kick off again and again and again until it has completed it's scan. Likely a sys restore caused your anti virus scanner to reset and not kick off after reboot.
Next time it happens, press: ctrl+shift+esc, then select processes tab, then left click on CPU. It's a quick way to see what is using the most cpu charge at any given moment. Wouldn't suprise me to see Savservice at the top of your list next time your PC bogs down.

Just a thought, hope it helps.

 

This one is an easy fix actually..

Go into Control Panel - System - Hardware tab - Device Mangler button...

Then go to the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers line, hit the + sign for a sub-view
of the different controllers listed. Highlight the Secondary Dual Channel IDE Controller, Right click and choose uninstall.

Close all that, get out of Control Panel.

Wow.. look, it's all fast and stuff now.
Play a video, wav or mp3 file.. WOW, no stuttering audio!!!

However, you must reboot and let windows find the device and install again. Let it do it. Still fixes the problem.

Somehow the Secondary (and sometimes the primary) IDE controllers get hosed and this happens.

Hope this works, worked for me and many other computers (hp dv5000) I've worked on.

(I know this message is rather old but I thought I'd give it a shot anyway)

Regards,
Hock Tuey