System slows after a few hours

6 year old media center. Runs like new after reboot, slows to a crawl after 3-4 hours. XP, 1.5 G, Intel 4.2, 2.8 GHz No Mal or virus according to avg and MWB. Everest says temps OK. Ran "Performance" which gives a Passmark rating of 286 after reboot and 69 several hours later. Any help?

 

Seems random but whatever is open is using more than normal. Avg even when not running scans can be as high as 90 at reboot 1-3

 

Run this wee prog through you may have a hidden virus/trojan hogging.

http://www.gmer.net/

 

How often do you defrag? Try smart defrag, give your system a good defrag and see how it runs then.

 

How much free hard drive space do you have? Windows uses hard drive space as "virtual memory" and if the hard drive space gets low the system will run slower.

Sam

 

Ran GMER - nothing in red A few (10) lines like text C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\IEXPLORE.EXE[3456] USER32.dll!DialogBoxParamW 7E4247AB 5 Bytes JMP 3E1DF4B9 C:\WINDOWS\system32\IEFRAME.dll (Internet Explorer/Microsoft Corporation)

And 5 like: AttachedDevice \Driver\Tcpip avgtdix.sys (AVG Network connection watcher/AVG Technologies CZ, s.r.o.)

Defrag current although not with smart

Free space on HD 43 GB (150 GB HD)

 

Do you have 'spybot' installed as from past experience this can cause these symptons ???

 

I did have spybot several months ago.Just checked and had one folder left, which I removed. There did not seem to be much in it.

 

I'd be inclined to keep an eye on device manager as plodr suggested when it is slowing down and try and find what is hogging resources.

 

I don't mean to interfere, just jumping in with a snippet of info, but I have had many people with older pc's running AVG and after removal and replacement with Avast they have seen major improvements in speed. AVG seems to have gotten heavier and heavier with each new edition.
I realise this is not likely your issue but it may help your overall performance.

 

Thanks. I have been monitoring Tskmgr and with Process Exp as well. Seems more global than specific. No one thing stands out. After reboot, services, proc exp and DPC can all be as high as 20% CPU. After reboot they are all 0-1. When slow does not always go to 100% CPU but does get REAL slow.

CPU temp only 64 C when on all night, but drops to 55 on reboot. Still all within range.

I did update avg not too long ago and it does seem to more of a hog than before. Thanks for the tip on Avast.

 

Well some may dissagree with me but I noticed the first major usage change in AVG when it moved to AVG 7 and it seemed to get heavier with each new installment. Thats why I moved over to Avast.

Again sorry for interupting but I thought it may just help your overall performance.

 

I removed AVG and while it may have helped overall it did not make a difference in the slowdown after a few hours. Also tried blackvipers suggested saf config it didn't help either. Dragging my feet on reformatting.

 

Just out of interest have you run the computer for a long period without internet connection as this could point to an elimination at least ?

 

May not quite be on track with this one given the posts to date.

Nothing is running in scheduled tasks? updates? defragmentation or other scheduled tasks that may have not been disabled when various apps were uninstalled?

Cleared temporary files? CCleaner is great for this sort of thing. - use its backup option before running.

Hard disk checks out ok? bad sectors.

Run memtest check out your ram?

You may try a "burn in wizard" typically new p.c's have this done for approx 24 hours, puts a P.C under a "heavy work load" to see if your system is having a hardware failing issue, reccommend that you back up your data first of course.

Your capacitors on the motherboard have no bulging tops?

These may aid in eliminating hardware issues given the age of this p.c.

g.luck