Suddenly gone S L O W

[Parangles]

New build with ASUS A7N266 board and Athlon 1600XP, 256 RAM,
Win98SE - was running great- big grin on my face every day,
but all of a sudden it's deadly slow. How slow ? Click on 'Favourites' and you can count to 4 before it opens. Same if you click on Start> Programs> 5 seconds before you see the menu. Opening a program seems like an hour.

I have defragged 3 times in the past 2 days and each time it has taken 2 to 3 hours to complete versus the usual 10 minutes.
Start up items: Scan registry,Task mon, Sys tray, printer, Scheduling agent.
Ran anti virus - Norton- Nothing.
Cleaned out Temp/Downloads/History/ anything else I could think of even though that should not be a problem.
Board temperature (95 o )and chip(131 o) running very cool- way below threshold. Shut down for one hour to be sure- still the same.

What else can I try ? Thanks !

PS: Why does every machine in the house give trouble during the same week and then run perfectly for 6 months?

[Cricket]

Hi Parangles,

Check in Device Manager for yellow or red exclamation marks for either the IDE controllers or hard disks. Let us know what you find.

What did you do to the system just prior to this happening?

Cricket

[Parangles]

Sorry , forgot to mention that I saw that in my Search on the topic here and checked that too- 'No conflicts' , ' device working properly'. Just checked every single device again just now.
All seem OK.
The only unusual thing I did recently that I can think that would have affected it was to download Windows media player and some ? codex 8 ? software to run some streaming video.
I was not successful in getting the video to work and gave up on it. I am going to uninstall them and get back to you.
What time difference is it between Hawaii and Florida ?
Cheers,
Chris.
PS. 5 mins later- Should I check box in Windows Media Player uninstall : "allow removal of shared components" ? I'm getting serious warnings when I do.

[mike breck]

Also, try Ctrl+Alt+Del and Endtasking everything apart from Explorer and Systray. NAV you have to disable in Systray before Endtasking it.

Is it still slow with no background programs running?

Not too many fonts in your Font folder?

What HDs do you have? DMA still enabled?

Try running the Manufacturer's diagnostic software on the HDs - just in case.

HTH

[glc]

You are running 98SE on a Nforce board? I didn't think that was possible!

[RenegadeKing]

Yea, there are Nforce drivers for 98. It doesn't run nearly as well as 2K or XP does though.

[Parangles]

glc - I think you said that it would run with 98SE when I was
getting recommendations for a "cheap build'. Buying some new 'pretty' OS for $300 was not in the budget. I'll look tomorrow-
gotta go out now. I know for sure it was your blessing on the board and chip combo that made me buy it. Anyway it was running fantastic for 2 weeks.
Respects !

Ps. I'll try other suggestions early in the am. Thanks !

[Parangles]

OK glc- my apologies !

" I don't know about Win98FE compatibility - XP is recommended for the NForce boards. Our builder is offering that board with XP only - all their other offerings they give us a choice of 98se, ME, 2K, or XP both flavors. "

[Parangles]

From the ASUS manual : " This motherboard supports Windows 98/ME/and 2000/XP operating systems "
No distinction is made between 98 FE and SE, and I am running SE so can we say that the OS is not the problem ?

Mike- I'll try the HDD diagnostics later today. Don't see any DMA jumpers on the board or any reference to that in the manual.

Thanks,
Chris.

[glc]

DMA is found in the drive property sheets in device manager.

[Parangles]

DMA not enabled\checked - what should it be ?

[mike breck]

Tick the box to enable DMA. Also check your BIOS for any Ultra DMA settings. If there is one, then enable it.

What's the HD diagnostic verdict?

[GaryRouth]

Hi all

Just curious - is the machine suddenly speedy in Safe Mode?

And along the hard drive investigation lines, when booting normally, if you look in System Properties under "Performance", does it say "32 bit" for the "File System" and "Virtual Memory"? - or do you see "Some drives running in DOS Compatiblility Mode"?

And along the Registry clean up line = after you uninstall the video codec or whatever it was, try a run of RegClean or RegMaid (availabe for free download at the microsoft download site), those two seem to clean up Win98 pretty well, in case it's a Registry entry that's off

Best of luck,
. . . Gary

[Parangles]

Well..... just as rapidly and mysteriously as it went slow, it has gone back to normal fast speed. I just booted up this am. planning to run the HD diagnostics and its fine. Im not going to mess with it until it goes again.
Thank you to all of you, for all your help.
Chris.

[Cricket]

Hi Parangles,

Wow, strange behavior...you sure you don't have a virus, spyware or trojan?

Cricket

[Parangles]

Some infection was my first thought, but the AV scans all come up negative. I'm going to get some work done that Ive been putting off due to the painfull slowness, and then do some other checks. I'll report back to you all.
Thanks again,
Chris.
PS. maybe they don't need to use my PC this week !

[Parangles]

(About a month later )
This just went slow again. Dead slow. I found a bunch of stuff in the ctl/alt/del window most of which, if not all, are NOT showing in
Start Up, unless they are there under another name.

PC media tech
Explorer
Systray
NavaPW32.....??
BS clip............CD burner
HPsjvxd.......scanner is only HP hardware I have.
Stimon........ scanner won't run unless this is in start up.
Imagicon....??
Opware 32.... ??

I closed all except the top three and its now running fine.
What do I do now ? Reboot and then selectively close them and
find the offender? But then how do I stop it from loading ?
What are the minimum items neccecary in start up ?
Thanks,
Chris.

[catfishjoe_1]

Chris
I think you have a trojan or spyware/adware on your pc.
You should try this cleaner .It is a download of a trojan checker from www.pcworld.com . Also get this, adaware . This will check your pc for adware. The links take you straight to the download sdites. If you want to check them out use the pcworld link and search for them in the download section. You also might want to check into a firewall. Good luck.
cat

[catfishjoe_1]

Oh and what did you use to scan with, should have asked you that.
cat

[kittyfire]

"The only unusual thing I did recently that I can think that would have affected it was to download Windows media player and some ? codex 8 ? software to run some streaming video. "

Have you tried removing it to see what happens?

NavaPW32... Something to do with Norton AntiVirus
Imagincom or imgicon? One is... well I don't know. The other, the imgicon, is Iomega software.
Opware has to do with the scanning package software.

[catfishjoe_1]

Another thought. Does the slow down only occur when you are connected to the internet? If you have an anti-virus software installed that does auto updates that could be the cause of the slow down. I have norton 2003 and when it is updating it slows me down something terrible.
cat

[GaryRouth]

Parangles - catfishjoe has a good point about any programs that auto-update in the background - most recent editions of Norton do (you mentioned Norton in one of your 1st posts a while back). Other programs that dial home are the MediaPlayers: MS Media Player, RealPlayer, QuickTime - and all the Messenger/Instant Messenger programs have a lot of background activity. If the scanner software is killing your response time, you can simply disable it until you wish to scan, and then start those up. (I still do this on a P233mmx machine that my 4yearold uses - stimon only needs to run for the scanner, so I created a shortcut to start it and put it in the Scan program folder. We just start it when we're going to scan. And all the other background processes that scanners need usually will start up when a scan is begun. Most of the time these don't need to run every second of every day. You can double-check over at the pacs-portal startup list to be sure, though: http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_content.htm [I've posted the mainpage, rather than the list itself, because it has other useful information that might help you: the list itself is on a link not quite midway down the page]

Well, if you can make it through this despite my atrocious grammar and inventive punctuation - I applaud your endurance.
. . . Gary

[p.s. . . . seems like Windows Update acquires the ability to AutoUpdate after one of the recent Service Packs, too]

[RenegadeKing]

You can remove the startup items by going to Start..Run, and typing in MSconfig, and then going to the startup tab. Look at the list at the link GaryRouth posted (http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup...artup_full.htm), and uncheck items accordingly. HTH

[Parangles]

Well- Thanks to all. It's still paralysed. Press 'Start' and you can count to five before the menu is displayed. Today I have :
Run the spyware cleaner and the Adware cleaner- Nothing
Scanned with Norton 2000 AV again - Zero.
Did a 'Thorough" scan disc. No errors.
Did a second Defrag. Still the same.
Ran 'Regclean' - No help.
Gary that link isn't working, but I have nothing in start up now
anyway.

Thanks,
Chris.
PS. It seems to be particularly bad on the desktop. D&D ing an icon is painfully slow. Loading programs from desktop shortcuts too. What could I try there ?

[RenegadeKing]

You will probably want NavaPW32 in startup if you want Autoprotect for antivirus on. Have you considered maybe reinstalling windows?

[Parangles]

Renegade- that sounds frightening ! Will it just load on top of the existing installation and hopefully restore some lost defaults/files whatever ?
OOPs! I just remembered I've misplaced the CD. Will have to save that option till last.
Chris.

[RenegadeKing]

Well it seems you've tried everything else already. You will have to wipe out your harddrive first. You can backup any files you want to CDs (or some other media) first before you reinstall. Reinstalling windows will give you a fresh start, so then if it STILL has the problem, it may be a hardware problem. But I think reinstalling should fix it.

[catfishjoe_1]

Which OS are you using? I have had a similar problem with my pc ( winME ). Usually when this happens for me I do a restart and it is gone but then again you said this happened from boot-up, weird. Can you try to isolate what was run the very last time it was right? Maybe an application/program is not liking your system. Boy that was vague! It could be an incompatibility issue with an app and your operating system. Trying to figure out what was the last time your system was ok and what ran last may find the culprit. You might want to consider starting a log book of your own on what you run and how it runs to find the bad apple.
cat

[GaryRouth]

One other thing you could check is for a bios update for your motherboard. The earliest MSI nForce boards had a slowdown problem with the IDE/PCI transfers (not the same as the Via trouble), the tech site http://www.tech-report.com had run a story a few months back on this: should be fixed by now. But that particular slowdown is nothing as severe as what you're experiencing [still, considering your options, can't hurt to try]

Never a dull moment
. . . Gary

[Not sure why the pacs-portal site isn't working today. Might just be undergoing some maintenance. It usually works OK - it was working yesterday]

[Hmm....and while you're at the MSI site, check see if they have newer nForce Win98 drivers available, too. Really, you're lucky it runs well at all with Win98]

[Parangles]

Its back again ! Speedy as greased lightening.
I pulled out the cable from the 10/100 NIC and rebooted it still disconnected, and its fine ! Could be just co-incidence. The other PC's on the home net have never been affected with this slowness.
Plugged in the cable to post this.
I'll see if it lasts till the morning and get back to you.
Whats going on ??
Thanks,
Chris.