My wife's XP system is behaving oddly. The system itself is fine when running the usual applications but web browsing (using chrome, FF or IE) can be desperately slow - sometimes failing to load a page and sometimes taking several minutes - there's no unusual CPU loading or HDD thrashing when this happens. My system uses the same router and behaves OK. I thought I'd found the problem when I spotted there was only 1Gb free on the HDD, but it's just the same now that there's 10Gb free. Removing Rapport and ZoneLabs (and enabling the Win firewall) made no difference. The AV is MSE.
I'd prefer not to have to wipe and start again ... hence this cry of Help!
Have you tried running IE without add-ons? (Just in case you've not had need to use it, the shortcut usually lurks in Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools.)
IE seems to have a memory leak and needs restarting regularly.
On a couple of installations, I have had reason to suspect that Chrome generates a continuous network traffic, even when not in use. I clocked 100MB a day, which used up my monthly bandwidth quota in no time and no doubt didn't help performance. Removing Chrome stopped it.
The latest version of FF (11.0) together with its "plugin-container" seem to become CPU hogs. Restarting it helps.
I hope that provides some clues.
Chris (who now has a shiny new, but also abominably slow Windows 7 system)
Here is what I would try in order to resolve the problem.
Cables do and can go bad, try swapping cables on your wife's machine.
Like cables, router ports can go bad, try swapping router ports between your computer and your wife's, or move her to a spare port.
Before doing any kind of changes to the computer software, try booting a Live Linux CD on the affected machine and see how the browser supplied with it performs. If the speed is back to normal then the problem most likely with the XP software.
A rather small but complete downloadable ISO file for burning to CD that I like is Puppy Linux. It is relatively easy to use, even for someone like me that does not use Linux for more than testing purposes.
You can download the 132MB ISO file from the main repository at:
formatting link
trying the above suggestions report back. If the problem is still there or has been isolated to the XP system, as in the browser works fine in Puppy Linux, then there are other avenues that can be explored.
The others have suggested everything I can think of except defrag the operating system drive (and the data drive if you store your data on a separate drive). Start by deleting history and temp files. Then restart, do the defrag and restart again.
Windows malicious software removal tool is a real system hog!
If you right click on the system tray toolbar XP should put up an option to display the task manager. Click on the *processes* tab and see what is using a large %age of CPU time.
I have Firefox V3.6, Safari, IE8 installed - and also had Chrome. I normally only use Firefox. One day, I found that my normal Firefox web browsing started frequently deciding to slow to a crawl. Task Manager revealed that an installer was running, and taking up most of the CPU time. I think the file which was running was one of the many named 'system.exe' in the PC, and it took some time to trace it to something Chrome was doing spontaneously. I made sure that Chrome wasn't starting at boot-up (which it wasn't), but I couldn't see where the problem lay. In the end, I uninstalled Chrome, and the problem stopped.
As the misbehaviour is common to several browsers, suggests a lower level problem. Suggest you try resetting the TCP/IP stack by following the destructions here:
Misbehaving upstream router and YOUR machine set to default to 1500 bytes or more TCP/IP packet size (MTU). try 1400.. packet fragmentation handled badly leads to LOST of lost packets.
What router are you using? Wired or wireless connection? (and is that the same on the other machine)
Some thoughts in no particular order:
Lack of space can have some influence... with the NTFS file system, you see a reduction in performance and the volume fills. At 90%+ this can be more noticeable, and may have an effect on the creation of many small files (as will often be the case when web browsing) - however your lack of hard drive activity does not point to this being the root cause.
(highly fragmented drives can also have a negative influence - basically forcing lots of extra seek time and rotational latency delays as the system has to thrash about writing lots of small files into widely spread available spaces - but again, probably not enough of a difference to explain what you are seeing)
Have you tried starting your browsers without loading any plug ins etc?
For IE, start from the command line with "iexplorer -extoff" For firefox its "firefox -safe-mode"
(there are usually menu equivalents of each of these)
I would also suggest downloading Malwarebytes antimalware, letting it patch itself to the latest version and then doing a full scan with that. Its very good at finding browser add ins and helper objects that are undesirable.
Another program to track down is Trend Micro's HijackThis. Run it and copy the log file it produces, and paste it into the analyser on the Hijackthis.de web site. That will attempt to identify malicious entries that are loading up either as your system starts or as browser helper objects.
Make sure you have not got multiple antivirus programs running concurrently. They each wedge themselves into every file access, and even the best ones sap significant resources these days, so you don't want more than one!
One possible cause of poor browsing performance is slow or incomplete name resolution. This could be cuase by (for example) a misconfiguration of your machine asking it to lookup internet names using a non existent or broken domain name server, before it gets to try the proper one. This can easily slap sever seconds of delay into each "hit", when some pages may require hundreds of hits to fully download.
Type ipconfig/all in a command line, and look at the list of DNS servers on your ethernet card. Typically this would just be one entry, and would be the same as your default gateway.
You can manually check lookup speed using the NSLOOKUP command line program. e.g.
nslookup
formatting link
should come back with a pretty fast response.
You could also try running a test against Mrs Gibson's DNS benchmark site:
formatting link
Depending on which XP install CD you have, you may find you can do a parallel install of windows if required (i.e. one where you don't accept the default option of C:\windows for the install directory). This would enable you to select a clean version from an early boot menu and see if that clears up the problem without trashing your current version. Note however this will need a few gig spare space!
A hardware problem is also possible, although you would be unlikely not to see it in other aspects of the systems operation. Failing hard drives can appear to work, but perform very badly due to carrying out excessive reties to recover data from the drive. Download a copy of speedfan, and use its SMART diagnostics page to look at the hard drives own internal health records.
The fact that it affects all online stuff should be a clue. I'm not saying its not a virus, but it would be interesting to see if any other software is slow. When he says its slow, is the application slow loading local pages as well as ones from the web?
Another thought is that if the virtual memory has been low for a while then xp does have the issue that it fails to increase the size when you give it more disc space. This can be a real pain to fix. I think from memory its in system in the control panel somewhere. Another thing to look at though it may be a long shot is the disc access mode if for example any cd or dvd software has tried to copy a protected disc. XP can set the access for discs to pio only and not dma when available. This should also show up in a longer than usual start time and problems with streaming media. There is a vbs script for this, which if it is needed I could throw on dropbox.
Other thoughts. This might not please you. Often the user.dat can get corrupted, and one symptom of this as well as slow browsers can be slow appearence of icons on the desktop. The only cure i've found for this is to delete the user and create it anew, with all the ramifications of this to personal folders settings and documents. Brian
Excellent suggestion. My machine runs XP, and occasionally slows to a frustrating crawl. Running Malwarebytes invariably fixes it. Whatever the underlying problem is, I don't know. I'm usually very careful, run Avast, Zone Alarm etc., yet something manages to creep through. Malwarebytes always fixes it, though.
This sort of fault is quite likely to be an interaction between the ever increasing size of the AV databases and the very finite amount of memory in the XP machine. The symptoms are usually that the thing thrashes to disk and moves like wading through treacle. These days you need more than 2GB ram to run XP successfully and actually do things.
Looking to see what is hogging memory may help if you can get the taskmanager to respond - give it half an hour or so to wake up! I have seen XP stall trying to do screen refresh on memory constrained systems after the latest AV updates grabbed only a few MB more ram.
First use one of the online scanning services and/or download a bootable AV tester from a trusted AV vendor to eliminate any viruses. Then provided you are behind a firewall router briefly unloading the AV entirely and visiting a couple of trusted websites may shed some light.
Avast if you have no anti-virus and then scan the entire disk. Is the Anti-virus up-to-date i.e. do you update it at least daily? Then install Ad-aware, and scan the entire disk again.
Often this can be installed Webstuff that tracks what you're up to. It may not be of an "illegal nature" but it slows the machine to a crawl.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.