Computer incredibly slow, no CPU usage, no commit charge, especially when using HDD.

durandal4532

So.

My computer has had some fuckups recently. Programs, even process explorer, take forever to start up. Team Fortress 2 takes over 10 minutes. Firefox takes 5-10.

Occasionally, I'll get an error message from either Firefox or Avast's web service that says "Map/Set iterators not found" and that there's an issue with C++ or something, and forces me to shut down the program.
Edit: Okay, the error is:

title: Microsoft Visual C++ Debug Library)
program: the name/location of the program (ashwebsrv.exe)
file: C:\program files\microsoft visual studio 8\vc\include\xtree
line: 273
expression: map/set iterators incompatible

see the Visual C++ documentation on asserts

Abort Retry Ignore. (Retry doesn't do anything)

Edit edit: After pressing Abort it says: Runtime error! R6030 -CRT not initialized


Writing to the hard drive takes for fucking ever. And it slows everything down to a crawl. It took me 10 hours to install Neverwinter Nights 2, compared to my roommate's 3, and 4 hours to update, to my roommate's 1. And his computer is a piece of shit compared to mine.


Any ideas what the fuck is going on? I've run defrag, chkdsk, Spybot, Avast, and Counter-Spy and they've found nada.

Dixon

It could be your harddrive, do you have a harddrive read/write light on your computer...when its not doing anything check to see if you can see the light come on or if you can hear the harddrive whirring. The drive may be dieing

durandal4532

I was thinking that, but I'd prefer not to just buy a new hard drive without being able to confirm. Is there anything I can do to actually be certain my hard drive is fucked beyond putting in a different one?

Dixon

You can download seatools, its a free program you download. It's a ISO file you burn to a disk and boot from. I use it all the time. Just go to the seagate website (Note harddrive can be of any brand)

Iconoclysm

It's probably a good idea to check your event log for any system errors too. It sounds like disk operations are timing out and repeating until they succeed, which should be reflected by a shit-ton of errors logged. Also Make sure SMART is enabled in your BIOS options and google/download a free SMART monitoring/interrogation tool to check the drives internal diagnostic stats

Dixon

oh yeah event logs...if you don't know where they are go to the control panel, make sure it is in classic view and go to administration tools and then event viewer

Goonbridge

Have you checked your HDD is not running in PIO mode?

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/IDE-DMA.mspx

durandal4532

Actually, yeah. I forgot that. It does flip to PIO mode occasionally, and fuck up even more until I uninstall the drivers and reinstall. But the problems reported above happen when the HDD is in DMA mode.