*** is going on?

**sail3005** · Apr 19th, 2002, 11:21 AM

my computer is getting slower, i swear. there are delays on almost everything. opening programs, even right click menus.

i know my computer was not this slow before, and it is getting worse. what should i do?

**filburt1** · Apr 19th, 2002, 11:39 AM

REFORMAT

**sail3005** · Apr 19th, 2002, 11:43 AM

lol, i thought that was the inevitable thing. i have some major bitrot going on here. i haven't formatted in about 5 months, which is a really long time for me.

**chrisjk** · Apr 19th, 2002, 12:18 PM

I don't see the point in formatting even every 5 months, if there is nothing wrong with it, why bother.

Still, it does sound like the only option unless something you recently acquired is causing it in which case you might want to try uninstalling it.

Some apps/viruses seem to hog the processor, causing it to run at 100% all the time (i got one of those

), meaning everything takes forever. If you can hunt it down, remove it, otherwise nuke the lot.

**Wynd** · Apr 19th, 2002, 12:28 PM

Defrag and see if that helps. If not, do what chris said.

**JoshT** · Apr 19th, 2002, 01:26 PM

What OS? I had a problem with W2K switching my hdd to PIO instead of DMA mode. I had to actually delete the primary IDE controller from device manager and let Windows find it again at reboot.

Also, use Ad-aware if you download a lot - I've seen PCs get a decent speed boost after the spyware was deleted.

**sail3005** · Apr 19th, 2002, 01:53 PM

Defraggin doesn't help

i have done that before.

i have tried a bunch of stuff. Nothing seems to work. i'll try a few of the things i have suggested, but i want to format as a last resort, because i finally have everything working properly (except for the speed)

**Gandalf_Grey_** · Apr 19th, 2002, 04:25 PM

format, i format about once a month

**JungleMan** · Apr 19th, 2002, 04:26 PM

Mine did this when running IIS...apparently i didn't patch it...

Other than that...reformat?

**Gimlin** · Apr 19th, 2002, 04:29 PM

If you have it, try Norton Utilities.

jim mcnamara · Apr 19th, 2002, 04:50 PM

Other things that cause this kind of behavior -

On Win9x systems - the Registry has a a lot of entries, or on Win98 or Win95 is over 64K. Use Regclean.exe to fix it. Or Goto Win2K

Early NT family or Win9X - the root directory on C: has more than 512 entries in it - known problem. One solution - move files/folders out of c:\ to some other subfolder. Another solution - goto Win2K or SP2 (? can't remember the last SP for 98) for Win98.

No virtual memory - check to see that you have enabled virtual memory. Usually this causes big-time hangs.

If the degradation is on image activation, look into how to word-align large image files (.EXEs) on the disk. Especially true for MS apps. Word-aligned images pre-load up to 4MB on image activation. Non-aligned images will not do that. This only works for large image files, obviously.

disk thrashing - if the disk light comes on like 25 times per minute, even with no activity from the user, check your startups.
Early versions of virus checkers Dr. Solomon & Norton will go into 'check-the-disk-for-viruses' mode and stay there - it uses up CPU but most importantly it degrades i/o for processes and paging by Windows. What happens is the i/o queue request length becomes long so the total wait for an i/o by windows or any other app goes up. Kernel mode interrupt time also goes up - which means you are wasting substantial cpu on context switching.

**sail3005** · Apr 19th, 2002, 05:30 PM

how do i see if i have virtual memory enabled?

**Gandalf_Grey_** · Apr 19th, 2002, 05:38 PM

i think in win98 you have to right click my computer then go to properties then vitrual memory, but it has been a while since i have used 98

**sail3005** · Apr 19th, 2002, 06:38 PM

i have 2k....

btw, how do i clean out the registry in 2k?

**sail3005** · Apr 19th, 2002, 08:03 PM

bump

**Gandalf_Grey_** · Apr 19th, 2002, 08:32 PM

goto download.com and download something like regvac, it will scan your registry entries for unused keys

**sail3005** · Apr 19th, 2002, 10:29 PM

Cool, i just ran clean sweep. i got tons of space back, and my comp is running a lot faster!

**zmerlinz** · Apr 20th, 2002, 04:54 AM

another thing that you can check is that you haven't got too many fonts installed as this can slow down your machine considerably, and also if you have installed Office make sure that findfast has been deleted and gone completely because that is notiourious for hogging processor usage

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