Win XP suddenly very sluggish in loading programs

Hi all. I hope I can get some advice on this...

First off, I am a long time computer user and understand WinXP fairly well, just to give you an idea of my ability to understand your advice.

Starting about a week ago, my computer has completely changed its behavior. The OS is quite sluggish, and most programs are especially slow in loading up. I monitor what's happening in the task manager, and I don't see any heavy CPU activities. What I do notice is that most programs are only loading up at about 2MB / sec. Something else new that I'm seeing is that services.exe is often taking about 5% CPU, where normally I never see it taking anything. In the first 3 minutes of runtime, it will take 100% and freeze the system for a few seconds.

I really haven't done anything new that I can think of. I did update to the latest NVidia video drivers, but as part of my diagnostic process, I uninstalled the driver and installed the old driver. No change.

Here's a list of what I've done to try and diagnose the problem, with no positive results:

- Scandisk
- Defrag
- Registry clean
- AVAST! virus scan
- AdAware scan
- Examined SMART info on my HDD (WD SATA single drive)
- Ran Prime95 overnight to check for memory issues
- Ran Sandra benchmarks / tip wizard to check performance issues
- Consistently monitor CPU usage using Speedfan and Task Manager
- Tried disabling HDD write cache and index service
- Nothing showing an issue in the device manager
- No problems in the event viewer

None of the above have provided me any clues as to what's wrong. Just based on observation, it seems that there's an issue in the process of loading programs into memory. Once a program is up and running, it runs fine. Sluggishness is only limited to programs loading up. It does impact programs that do alot of loading, such as internet explorer, which starts a separate instance for each new tab.

I'll be happy to attach a DXDiag file, or whatever else may help.
Info on system:
ASUS A8N Nvidia chipset
AMD Athalon64 3500+
GeForce 7900 series SLI vid card
2MB Ram
Win XP Home SP3

I'm at my wits end, and I have so much installed on my WinXP I do NOT want to reinstall the OS. I greatly appreciate any advice you may have for me.

 

Have you scanned your computer to see if anything is in it? Try this link http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=35407 and post the logs in the malware section of forums. Also it can take some days or a week to get a reply. Also theres this link to basic cleaning up on tring to improve the running of a computer. http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=106650

 

Well, as in my first post, I have done a virus scan and adware scan with no positive results.

I did finally find a clue:

http://www.tanelorn.us/media/pics/FileSystems.jpg

The access time in my windows partition is terribly slow. The other partition I use for data, it is the majority of my HDD, and has no problems. The image is actually after my second test. The first showed access time as twice as bad as this one I uploaded.

 

Welcome to Majorgeeks.

What % free space is on your drive? Have you tried deleting and reinstating the Windows Pagefile? Could you uninstall IE8 and revert to IE7 to test?

 

My windows drive is 70% free, my data drive is 40% free. I have been using firefox because IE8 was so horrible with these new issues. I did uninstally IE8, and reinstall, in case it was a culprit. But no change.

I looked up some info on the pagefile, and manipulating it seemed to be alot of trouble. Can you recommend specific steps for dealing with it, please? My pagefile.sys on my C drive is 2GB. I recently, as a test, changed my memory usage in the control panel from 'programs' to 'system cache'. I haven't noticed much change, but if the pagefile seems big to you, that may be why.

My virtual ram settings are set to 'system managed'. It says the pagefile is 4GB for both drives (which probably means 2GB alotted to each). The HDDs are 93GB (C drive) and 204GB (D drive) total possible space.

 

When was your last GOOD defrag?
How many programs are running in the background?

 

I installed Autoruns and was amazed how many files, folders, apps etc. start at Logon. Unchecking apps that aren't necessary at Logon or Boot up, took a big load off the cpu. Doing this might speed up your apps at start up. Just adding one more app was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

 

I hope I'm reading this correctly; you have 1 physical HDD partitioned into 2, the first partition contains windows (93GB), the second is your data partition (204GB).

If this is correct, ensure that you only have a pagefile on the first (fastest) partition.

 

kind of interesting. i just set up an xp machine for my teenage daughter. it started out fine. i installed xp sp2 which ultimately took 67 hotfixes not counting the sp3 update. anyway, i installed a couple of simple utilities downloaded from MG, added oa free 4.0.0.15 and panda cloud av. also added iobit asc free. ran fine for a couple of hours and then rather suddenly(from where i sat) it started lagging BAD. just judging from the hdd indicator light the prob looks to me like a disk access bottleneck, but why? this is a fresh install for pete's sake.
the machine is a dog(just a temp, she broke her last one) but well within xp specs and like i said it started out running fine. i'd be pulling my hair out too (if i had hair lol), esp since everyone wants to use my box cause the other one is so slow now.:cry
i will be following this thread cause i'm in the same boat with her machine.
i'm starting to wonder about the hotfixes and the sp3 update. something has to be causing it.