PC Starts up fine, 30 second laters slloowwwss

Okay. This is a weird problem. My PC starts up fine, then after about 30 seconds of running it slows down almost to a stop. However, I can still move the mouse, but it takes about a minute or two or three to move from one side of the screen to the other. I can't really do anything on the computer. I have no idea what could cause this. I'm pretty sure its not a malware/adware. My computer is kinda old, probably like 5 years old. It is a P4 1.8ghz.

I'm not sure of the problem. Maybe it is the main hard drive dying.

My hypothesis is that it is the RAM. When I start the pc up, you see a black screen and like 5 lines of white text about the computer. The last line is ram. On that pc the screen is kind of cut off(always has been since a new monitor, and I've even tried horizontal align and it didn't work still). Anyway, the ram all I can see is 0mb. Now, I don't know if this is correct or not, but I don't think it should even end in 0mb. When its RAM its usually 64mb, 128mb, 256mb, 512mb, 1024mb, etc. So this leads me to believe that maybe my ram died.

I don't know. If anyone has any suggestions I'd love to hear them. Thanks folks.

Dustin

 

What OS and what type of computer? Details such as this always help in trouble shooting. What is the text on your black screen verbatim?

Welcome to Major Geeks!

 

Okay.

It's Windows XP Pro, SP2 installed.
An old Gateway.

I did a little more reading about some things. I believe 16mb of memory would be used for graphic card, so 256(which is what I have in the pc) minus 16 would be 240. So I'm guessing that's what the other numbers are that I can't see due to the cut off screen. Now I'm thinking maybe not the RAM.

Here is the 4 lines of text I see:
NVIDIA GeForce2 MX400 VGA BIOS
Version 3.11
Copyright
0MB

The version line has a bunch more numbers and the copyright line has some words and years.

Okay so I have played a few games to try to 'beat the clock' of doom. I ctrl alt dlt to get the task manager, then I click the performance tab. Right away the CPU process goes up to 100%. Maybe its due to another problem, or maybe the CPU is dying. I just have no idea. I just want to get out of frown town and play on my pc.

Well, I'll post anything else I can find out. My ram is pc2100 266MHz and there is just one stick of 256mb and it looks like there is another slot for an additional stick if I had one.

Dustin

 

Looks to me that your video card memory isn't being read, and as a result the cpu has to do all of the calculations to draw your screen, which can become very grueling on a cpu.

I don't know how to fix this though...

 

Have you tried booting in safe mode to see if the problem persists? Try going to Control Panel/System/Hardware and click on Device Manager. You will see a tab for Display Adapters. Does yours show an exclamation point in a yellow background?

 

Also, when you checked task manager and saw the useage was pegged at 100%, did you check the processes to see which ones were using an exorbitant amount of CPU resources?

System Idle Process doesn't count.

 

Okay. The I booted the PC in safe mode and the problem doesn't exist. I'm going to poke around and see if I can find anything interesting.

The Display Adapters does not show a yellow exclamation point next to it.

I really have no idea what could be wrong.

Dustin

 

Yeah. So I poked around in safe mode and found nothing. I don't know what to do or to look for.

Dustin

 

You could always read post 6

 

Okay. I'm not sure what did it. But the problem fixed itself. All I did was boot the pc in safe mode and then restarted it in regular mode and it all worked fine. I have no idea what caused it. Are there any tests I can run to see if something isn't running how it should? Also, I do not have a virus checker, I know there used to be an online scanner thing and I was wondering if those still exist. I do have spybot-search & destroy for spyware.

The only thing I've noticed since using the pc now, when I started up uTorrent, it came up with an error that a certain .dat file was corrupted or missing, and that it had found it.

Well, I appreciate everyone's input and help. I'm just glad this one solved itself.

Dustin

 

Going into safe mode and doing nothing, then exiting safe mode solves a lot of problems
It turns so many things off and runs in VGA mode, assuming your problem was with the video that fixed it.