PC slowing to a crawl - help

Grundlestiltskin

So long story short, my PC has slowed to the point where it's almost unusable if I'm doing a lot of things at once. Compared to my (last year's) macbook pro, my tower absolutely crawls. Right now I'm running Chrome with 5 tabs, iTunes, and the WoW patcher, and even switching between tabs can take a significant amount of time. Bringing up the task manager alone to monitor memory usage took about 20-30 seconds. Starting iTunes took about 2 minutes before I heard the HD whir and the application finally loaded.

I have an Intel Core 2 Duo, 3.0 GHz, with 2 gigs of RAM. Obviously not the most high end, but it should be able to handle what I'm doing more easily than it is. Running XP SP2. 182/232GB in use on my C drive. Ran a defrag recently, Spybot, Adaware, Malwarebytes and AVG turn up nothing significant.

What could my problem be? I know I'm a bit short on RAM, but I feel like that can't be the only problem. Thoughts?

jungleroomx

More RAM. Might want to look into Windows 7, too.

amateurhour

How much is in your startup? If you've got Spybot, Adaware, Malwarebyes, and AVG loading at boot (their command consoles) then all of those are eating at your ram and processors from the start, along with whatever else might be there.

Go to start/run/msconfig and click the startup tab. See how many programs are checked. If it's over 30, you need to do some cleaning.

Grundlestiltskin

amateurhour wrote: »

How much is in your startup? If you've got Spybot, Adaware, Malwarebyes, and AVG loading at boot (their command consoles) then all of those are eating at your ram and processors from the start, along with whatever else might be there.

Go to start/run/msconfig and click the startup tab. See how many programs are checked. If it's over 30, you need to do some cleaning.

Looks to be about 32 apps currently checked. How do I figure out what I need to keep?

Protein Shakes

What programs are you running in the background? Open task manager and check memory and CPU usage.

Upgrade to XP SP3 and patch it to the latest windows update patch. Do the same for the other programs as well.

Scrublet

Have you formatted? There's definitely been times in my past where my computer has been running like shit and formatting has cleaned it all up. I used to do it once every 6-8 months. Now that my gaming computer only does games, and my laptop has much less being installed/uninstalled since it never does games, I usually go annually or longer.

amateurhour

Grundlestiltskin wrote: »

amateurhour wrote: »

How much is in your startup? If you've got Spybot, Adaware, Malwarebyes, and AVG loading at boot (their command consoles) then all of those are eating at your ram and processors from the start, along with whatever else might be there.

Go to start/run/msconfig and click the startup tab. See how many programs are checked. If it's over 30, you need to do some cleaning.

Looks to be about 32 apps currently checked. How do I figure out what I need to keep?

Can you post a screenshot of your startup tab?

Viscountalpha

It's possible the hard disk is failing. If your not suffering from a malware or virus, It's the only other thing that makes sense.

Grundlestiltskin

Startup tab. Had to break it up because i couldn't expand the window. This is after I turned a bunch of stuff off.


http://img532.imageshack.us/img532/799/config1.jpg
http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/9628/config2.jpg
http://img821.imageshack.us/img821/628/config3.jpg

Grundlestiltskin

Viscountalpha wrote: »

It's possible the hard disk is failing. If your not suffering from a malware or virus, It's the only other thing that makes sense.

I considered this, it's a pretty old hard drive. I'm too poor to address that right now - Windows 7 and more RAM are similarly out until I have more money :?

jungleroomx

Its not your startup tab, you've got maybe 10 checked to go on startup.

I don't know if its a failing hard drive, as the switching between tabs wouldn't be nearly as effected by that as it would RAM.

Your RAM could be going bad, as well.

Tofystedeth

Oh cool, look at that.

Malware.

Grundlestiltskin

Tofystedeth wrote: »

Oh cool, look at that.

Malware.

I've been wondering what the hell that was. It's been "crashing" on startup for weeks, until I just disabled it and it left me alone. Searches on Google for that file turned up nothing, and none of my anti-malware programs turned up anything. Also, the file that the menu option references doesn't seem to exist. It's not visible, not hidden. No idea.

On an unrelated note, disabling a bunch of shit in startup and installing SP3 seems to have dramatically reduced PF usage. Which is good, I guess.

Tofystedeth

I'd boot into safe mode and run MalwareBytes again, and possibly the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool (mrt.exe from the run prompt). You might also try going through your registry and checking for places that reference that file name. Don't delete them, since some of them may be legitimate keys that have been changed.

The reason it crashed is probably that MBAM or something found it at one point and deleted the file, but didn't catch some of the other bits.

Grundlestiltskin

This is what a registry search turned up. I don't know registries, so I have no idea what it means.

http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/1069/esu.jpg

Tofystedeth

That's the only result? Looks like where msconfig put disabled entries. You can probably safely delete that one.