Slow PC maintenance
Geeky, Operating Systems, Software May 22nd, 2006
Over a few nights last week, I spent some time working on someones PC that had crashed and would not boot into XP Home. The error was one of the usual "Blue Screen Of Death" greetings cards that Windows likes to send you on occasion:
0×000000ED: UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME
I suspected a faulty hard disk but luckily, the fix was easy enough and a quick boot to the Recovery Console and a CHKDSK /F resolved the fault. Excellent! However, the person also explained that the PC was running very very slow – and they were right. Disk thrashing? More like disk armageddon! It was quite quick to boot to the login screen but then crawled to load the various startup processes and applications. The machine was not really usable for about 4 minutes. So, firstly I ran a standard Windows XP defrag. This made it slightly quicker. I then defragged the pagefile and system files using PageDefrag from Sysinternals followed by a good bottom wipe using Registry Mechanic. But the PC was still really slow to access the drive! There was plenty of free space on the drive (over 13gb) and the memory usage never went over 60% either! No spyware was found, no viruses were found either and a trawl of the eventlog did not show any issues with saving/reading from the drive. All appeared ok. Would anyone else recommend anything to get the drive back to normal? Apart from a re-format and reinstallation of XP?
Entries
May 22nd, 2006 at 10:42 am
i've seen this before where a rogue process got stuck in a tight disk-thrashing loop on startup. grab sysinternal's filemon and monitor disk activity. i'd also check the cabling — bad kinks in an ide cable can dramatically drop performance.
May 22nd, 2006 at 11:36 am
dunno if the hd is performing up to snuff – you could try hdspeed from george breese to see if it is: http://www.georgebreese.com/net/software/ you have to scroll down a bit to get to hdspeed
May 22nd, 2006 at 12:34 pm
I've seen this happen before, with my parents PC, but they had spyware out the ying-yang. I would suggest just installing a Linux distro, but since you seem to know what you're doing and all, I would say, maybe check out the RAM speed. Even if they have enough RAM to satisfy running their usual apps, it could be slow and pull the PC to a halt. Or maybe, the drive speed is just slow? Programs leaking memory? I dunno, I'm not A+ Certified yet.
May 22nd, 2006 at 1:36 pm
Run a thorough check of the hard drive using the drive manufacturer's diagnostic tool. If it says its fine, run it twice. I suspect the drive is dying. The drive is thrashing because it is retrying soft sectors, remapping bad sectors and accessing sectors that have already been remapped.
May 22nd, 2006 at 1:37 pm
You might need to turn on DMA transfers. Google for it, I don't have the energy to explain how right now.
May 22nd, 2006 at 2:00 pm
When using perfmon what are the disk statisitics you are seeing in the way of disk queue length etc. Using task manager which processes have the main amount of disk read/write activity occurring?
May 22nd, 2006 at 3:03 pm
The PC has gone back to the owner now – so i can't carry out the proper tests, but thanks for the feedback so far!
May 22nd, 2006 at 6:07 pm
To me the problem sounds like one of 2 things:
1. Too many applications loading on login, OR a program is reading an insane ammount of data when starting
2. Someones hiding a tonne of porn in the C:\documents and settings\username\ and windows is trying to load it all or something (I’ve seen this myself, but i’ve got over 5GB in there of random data and it doesnt affect me.. but i’ve seen it before)
And a good troubleshooter in this case isss.. “BootVis.exe” A Microsoft tool, but no longer distributed by them, Get your grubby mits on it sometime and play around..
Its good for determing what takes so muhc time to load and whatnot.(I once found an application — something to do with Norton AV — was taking over 3 minutes to boot on this single machine..
Its also got an optimise function where it supposable optimises the system bootup(But it never seemed to make much of a differnece to me.
DD32
May 23rd, 2006 at 4:13 am
The customer had installed Norton Internet Security and that seemed to take a long time to appea, so i expect it was this that was causing the issue.
They also only had 256MB of RAM which might have explained a few things too.
I expect a rebuild in the near future…