Computer Problem?

[pwdrive]

The wife's got tons of photo's on the computer, mainly old ebay listing photo's, she sells stuff on ebay, would deleting all those photo's improve matters?

She needs a computer for her ebay selling, she cannot afford to be without a PC, for reasons of customer contact etc, if things go silent at this end then customers will complain and her ebay rating goes down which is not good, she doesn't make a fortune but it does pay the food bills.

As I said earlier, it used to be fine, it's only really got slow this last week or so.

Lawrence.

[Mark Hennessy]

Not sure about HDD?

Got a bargraph up showing something, it says CPU usage 100%, memory 948 Mb, those figures vary a bit every second or so.

The above was taken with the internet on and ebay displayed.

Lawrence.

When the machine is unresponsive, what is the hard disc doing?

On some drives, you can hear them accessing the different tracks - a ticking sound. Modern drives are much quieter than old ones, so you might find that hard to judge.

In which case, what about the hard disc LED? Is it on more-or-less continuously when the machine is unresponsive, or is it hardly flickering at all?

This is important to clarify.

As I said earlier, it used to be fine, it's only really got slow this last week or so.

Yes, more RAM is needed, and definitely think about that in the fullness of time. But you are absolutely right to ask what's suddenly changed...

Deleting the photos will make no difference. You have plenty of space on the hard drive.

[Nick]

Ok. Two things we know - the machine is CPU bound (100%)and something has changed in the last week.

CPU bound probably means that either something is spinning or to many programs are running, leading to heavy paging.

So, what has changed?

The pictures will have no effect - When you bring up task manager in Windows and have a look at the "Performance" tab, the CPU always busy and no memory is free... This is a BIG hint...

Sounds like you're paging like crazy, so we need to stop stuff running that isn't necessary...

EDIT: Mark & I are crossing posts here  At least we seem to agree!

[pwdrive]

Not sure about HDD?

Got a bargraph up showing something, it says CPU usage 100%, memory 948 Mb, those figures vary a bit every second or so.

The above was taken with the internet on and ebay displayed.

Lawrence.

When the machine is unresponsive, what is the hard disc doing?

On some drives, you can hear them accessing the different tracks - a ticking sound. Modern drives are much quieter than old ones, so you might find that hard to judge.

In which case, what about the hard disc LED? Is it on more-or-less continuously when the machine is unresponsive, or is it hardly flickering at all?

This is important to clarify.

As I said earlier, it used to be fine, it's only really got slow this last week or so.

Yes, more RAM is needed, and definitely think about that in the fullness of time. But you are absolutely right to ask what's suddenly changed...

Deleting the photos will make no difference. You have plenty of space on the hard drive.

Ok...there was only one window on the screen, it was displaying ebay, I did a google search for a subject, the ebay window was now replaced by the google search listing window, all normal stuff, I then clicked the back button to go back to the ebay window and the green wirlygig (top left) started to go round then froze, at that point the HDD led was more or less constantly on, the HDD clicking was hard to discern ('cos of the fan) but clicking a way it was, the ebay window eventually was displayed after clicking the back button as said, but it took several seconds to do so.

Lawrence.

[pwdrive]

A bit of progress or so it would seem, went to msconfig again as per what robt suggested, not sure I had the hang of it first time round, however on the second attempt which I just tried I disabled everything except microsoft stuff, did a restart and the mouse is now responding as it should eg: a click on the mouse results in an action and surfing the web is quicker. If this condition is maintained then I will enable the stuff that was disabled one at a time and try to see which prog/app was slowing things down.

Lawrence.

[Mark Hennessy]

That sounds like progress

It's worth Googling for any in the list that you don't recognise, as they might be known for causing trouble.

Many of the start-up things aren't needed anyway. If your HP netbook is anything like the HP machine I have at work, it will have come with all sorts of unnecessary "crapware" installed.

Good luck - with patience you'll get there in the end!

Mark

[boater sam]

This sounds familiar. My Acer did this 2 years ago, 100% on the processor, dead slow.
Did all the reboots and stopping programs, no difference. It turned out to be AVG that was stuffing it up. Now I use Avast, no problems. Could it be your Norton?
I had to do a reinstall to get rid of the program bits, nothing else would shift them, Ccleaner etc did nothing.

[pwdrive]

I fired it up this morning after doing that msconfig stuff, the click on the mouse is still working ok, computer is slow but nowhere near as slow as it was as first reported, dumped Norton and AVG to see if things went faster, about the same I would say, anyways installed free avast and left it at that.

Quart and pint pot comes to mind, the notebook was a present to my wife from the girls some years ago, it's not been to bad over the years considering the amount of use it's had.

I think she would be better off with another PC with a larger screen.

Lawrence.

[Skywave]

Re: Avast! and AVG. 

I have a Pentium 4 type PC that runs Windows 2000. It has behaved itself very well for several years and runs (or was running) Avast! A/V. One morning, Avast! said it is time to upgrade the definitions - fair enough. But when I tried to do that, it complained that "not enough space to complete update". (It's never reported that before). There is a copious amount of spare disk space on drive C; RAM has not changed: still 64M - and on test, it is O.K.  Entire PC was checked for 'cookie junk', etc. and usual 'Net-imported rubbish: all clean.
Next step: remove Avast!; re-install from known-good backup. Result: no change.  

Removed Avast! again; installed AVG (ver. 9.0.914). That's better, but AVG does produce 'false positives' - including stating that an AVG file is 'infected', reporting that  the "digital signature is broken"! Ha!   A few other similar errors were reported on a full scan, but I was able to recognise those as 'false positives' - so I ignored them.
So no: AVG is not perfect (on this system, anyway). But it least it doesn't cause problems as Avast! did for some sudden and inexplicable reason.

Final remarks.
Yes, I am well aware that Windows 2000 is an old and superseded version of Windows and that there is a good case which can be made for upgrading to a more recent version of Windows:  thank you.  But the present installation meets my computing needs and, moreover, the fact that it uses Win 2k is not relevant to the scenario outlined above.

Al. / Feb. 4 //

[boater sam]

You say you were running AVG and Norton?
There will be conflicts if you run 2 anti virus programs.
As I said before, you will not clear AV programs by deleting them, you need to do a complete re-boot back to the bare op system.