Windows XP Slows to a Crawl!

[Powertrip]

This will be the 2nd comptuer I had in my shop this week thats got a fully functional install of windows XP thats been checked and double checked for viruses/spyware and is by all means clean of any performance hindering software...

Yet it takes 10 hours to do a defrag, 8 seconds to open internet explorer, and a whopping 3 minutes to boot and it's a celeron 1.7 GHz with 1024 MB of ram running on a 400 FSB with nothing in startup and a 80 GB hard drive only 50% full!

The only thing that fixed this is a clean install of windows xp, and what makes it really frustrating is that I can't pinpoint the cause, every benchmark I run gets doubled if not trippled with a clean install on both systems just by having a clean install. The reall question is what could be causing this sudden sluggishness? One system has only bee in operation for 6 months and it's slowed to a crawl before it's fresh install.

The only thing that is simular on these two systems was 80 system errors all on the 22nd and 23rd of October, perhaps a rouge windows update or something worse I'm not sure but there were all Service Control Manager erroros and only on those 2 days on both systems.

[GaryRouth]

Hi Powertrip


If you had bad weather, or anything that could cause some trouble with the consistency or quality of the electricity in your area recently, it could have affected the hardware in some manner - so it couldn't hurt to run diagnostics on the memory & hard drives.

As far as the errors go, did they all point to a particular service that was having trouble loading at startup? (Do you still have either PC with you, so you can still view the error message?)

You mention having checked with antivirus/antispyware scanners, did you check for rootkits already as well? That couldn't hurt to check, either - http://www.pcsupportadvisor.com/rootkits.htm

Double-check the Bios settings on the systems as well, as an electrical surge/sag can cause trouble with the settings. If the timings have been thrown off, performance can get unpredictable.

Best of luck
. . . Gary

[Powertrip]

I have ghosted their old drive so I can boot to either, I'll boot from the other one and try the rootkill, perhaps I can save the event viewer and you can take a gander at them.

applicationold.zip
systemold.zip

Ok those are probably the same thing but just incase. A lot of disk errors all on one day all at almost the same time.

Memtest ran all night and I have done one diagnistic full read scan on the samsung hard drive which came up error free. Must of been a power surge or brownout from all I can tell.

Funny when I booted up to thir old ghosted drive it came up with the "Not Genuine" for the first time, microsoft is yet again a thorn in my side.