XP slow in certain situations

[remulon]

I have a problem with my computer running XP professional. On boot it sails along until it gets to the desktop. All the icons show up minus the graphical info. this take a long time to update but it finally does. Once all the icons look good then everything seems to be fine.
On occassion the graphics info for the icons all of a sudden dissappears and the whole timewaster of updating the icons begins again. I also see this sometime if I come back to the computer when the screensaver has been running.
Anyone seen this before and any suggestions?

Thank you

[Faustus]

First off update your video files, also check how many processes are running in task manager.

What are your computers stats?

[remulon]

I will need to get home first for the finer details but it is an AMD running around 1.1 MHz. It used to move along just fine for my needs, definately something funny happening now.
There are perhaps 25 to 40 processes running, none of them are using more than a percent or two, it always shows 98% or so free processor time.

[Dv8ted2]

How many programs are running in your system tray? The more you have running, the more problematic things become.

[ozymango]

I'm assuming you have plenty of free disc space? XP becomes very, very unhappy if you go below 200mb of disc space (at a minimum), and likes lots more, so I'd check there, just for the heck of it. Also I'd run a defrag analysis on your hard drive, maybe you've got a lot of fragmented files and that's slowing things down.

To do a defrag, open the "My Computer" icon on your desktop, right click on your hard drive icon (C:\), go to "Properties," and in the Properties menu select "Tools." You'll see a button for defragment here; you can just do an "analyze" for starters, takes a few minutes, it'll tell you if you need to degfrag the disc or not. Worth a shot.

I'd also go ahead and download the free versions of Ad-Aware and Spybot, on the chance there's some spyware sneaking in your registry that's doing evil things in the background. Being you'r processes aren't up in the double digits it's probably not spyware or a trojan, but again, ever hurts to check.

Finally (and depressingly), a hard drive that's starting to go flaky can exhibit weird behavior like this -- various files start getting corrupted and may cause the computer to just sort of "stick" when running some processes (due to file corruption on various files), but usually if this starts happening, it starts getting worse pretty quickly. That is, if this has been going on for weeks, there's a good chance it's not a dying hard drive; but if this just started happening in the past few days, and more and more things start slowing down or misbehaving, I'd back up that drive IMMEDIATELY (if not sooner!). And start looking for a good deal on a new drive.

Good luck, hope something in one of these posts helps!

[offline]

When the background 1st appears, ctr - alt - del to get the task manager up and see which process is hogging the cpu, if any.

Your registery may be damaged or in need of compression, a startup program is intefering with your system, your hard drive may need defraging or you may have a trojan/virus/worm.

Easy Things you can try:

Go to http://www.pcpitstop.com & test your system
Run a trial version of registery mechanic
'' '' '''' of ewido anti-malware in safe mode
Run Hijack and post the results
Run Cleanup

This is in addition to the excellent advice posted by others above.

[ROF]

When the last time the drive was formatted.

It may seem a bit extreme but after you do this your entire computing experience is refreshed. Make sure to backup any critical data. If you have broadband net service, formatting your drive and getting it backup and running with all your software is as simple as boiling water.

[guns1inger]

Have you done anything silly, such as install a theme manager, styleXP or any other software that changes the appearance ? These can certainly produce the effects you are seeing

[remulon]

Thank you for all the replies...

Breaking information... just might be a hardware thing with the HD or motherboard. I was doing a backup with Ghost, previously I would see about 1000 Mbits per second as I backed up an image, now I see around 200 Mbits per second.
Does not seem to be anything in the BIOS out of the ordinary...
Question - Regarding Ghost, if I backup an image of a partion, then format it, then restore the partition, would the drive need a defrag if it needed one before the backup?

[Faustus]

The more important thing here is if you backup a partition that has a problem on it, reformat, then restore it you'll just bring the problem right back with the restore of the partition.

[JerryB]

I have a problem with my computer running XP professional. On boot it sails along until it gets to the desktop. All the icons show up minus the graphical info. this take a long time to update but it finally does. Once all the icons look good then everything seems to be fine.
On occassion the graphics info for the icons all of a sudden dissappears and the whole timewaster of updating the icons begins again. I also see this sometime if I come back to the computer when the screensaver has been running.
Anyone seen this before and any suggestions?

Thank you

Hi,
there could be several reason why..... but the following generally remedies a slow bootup and slow refresh time on your screen... make your computer overall more efficent...
note: your display will refresh itself ever so often and it's normallly quick..... this is normal... if it takes a long time to do this , you get what you discribes.... and cause by system slowness or it having a hard time finding or the file it needs to....

1. too many startup progrms running at boot up!! that slows everything!!!.... disable all needless applications that startup at windows boot.... also take a look at your services....... what service you can disable... doing these always increase bootup times...
2. how many icons on the desktop.. if you have 60 or 70.... get all the needless one ones off either delete them or consoldate them into one folder...... saves a lot of bootup time and refresh screens time.....
3. DEFRAG.... cures a lot of ill's......
4. always check virus and spyware......!!!!!
5. if in 24/32 bit color.... change to 16 bit hi color..... a big system speed increase across the board....!!
well those are my thoughts.. good luck

[ozymango]

Question - Regarding Ghost, if I backup an image of a partion, then format it, then restore the partition, would the drive need a defrag if it needed one before the backup?

Faustus already answered this (without specifically referencing Ghost), but yes, if you image a drive using Ghost or another imaging software, it pretty much literally makes an exact -- and I mean exact -- copy of your hard drive (and/or specific partition).

And that exact copy means that it copies every sector, every bit or byte, as an identical duplicate of the original (in terms of file structure). So if you've got a fragmented disc, Ghost will make a perfect copy of that fragmented disc.

So if your goal is a clean build, no, don't use Ghost. But if your goal is to back-up data so you can recover it later, if it turns out you've got a dying hard drive, then definitely Ghost works great, you can always clean up fragments later on a new drive. Much better than losing everything!