Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: colecampbell666 on July 25, 2008, 09:37:05 am
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As of late I've been having PC speed problems. While my PC was slow to begin with, I've recently been having massive speed problems.
Specs:
P4 1.5 Ghz, 256 KB Cache, 400 Mhz FSB
2 GB PC133 SDRAM
ATi Radeon 9550 PRO, 256 MB, 200 Mhz RAM, 250 Mhz Core
Some Maxtor HDD Supposed to be 160 GB, reads as 32. 7200 RPM
Generic PSU (Sparkle, I think), never had problems before.
Onboard Creative sound (5800 something, from 2001)
Gigabyte 8IDML mobo
Windows XP SP3
Anyways, I get stuttering every few seconds in most games I play, even FlashPlayer applications have this problem. It seems weird because it has never happened before with these games with this severity. I get stuttering in AoEII, which I used to be able to play fine before. I get much worse performance in EEII, HW2 stutters when there are more than a few ships, FlashPlayer stutters on YouTUbe videos, when my sister plays WebKinz... The list goes on.
The only thing I've changed in the last few months is upgrading to 2 GB of RAM, reinstalling Windows, and upgrading to SP3.
I have the latest Catalyst/chipset/whatever drivers, nothing running on startup besides AV, no unnecessary programs, no Spyware/viruses.
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May seem obvious but:
Clean out CPU heatsink, make sure you have good airflow
Check hard-drive (use HD tune or some such thing)
Defrag, virus scan, etc.
Ensure your memory is firmly locked in place, and that the timings are correct
Try another PSU
I think if Windows SP3 was going to cause problems it would have right away, but I could be wrong
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Done.
Not done.
Done.
Not done, but I'm certain it's in place, I put it in myself.
Not an option, and these symptoms are not typical of PSU problems.
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10:1 it's SP3. There's a reason why it's not a good idea to install a service pack without formatting the disk.
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As for the 32GB.... It sounds like you formatted the disk as FAT, instead of NTSF.
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10:1 it's SP3. There's a reason why it's not a good idea to install a service pack without formatting the disk.
Like I said, I installed it clean, and then upgraded to SP3.
As for the 32GB.... It sounds like you formatted the disk as FAT, instead of NTSF.
:mad: :mad: :mad: I. Have tried. Everything. With that hard disk. No, it is not FAT formatted. No, it does not have a limiting jumper. No, it's not the motherboard BIOS. Linux will sometimes see the drive (there's a specific sequence of formatting/partitioning to go through to get it to recognize the full drive, and when Linux sees the whole drive, Windows doesn't see it at all)
That doesn't really bother me as I have my 250 GB external, what bothers me is the speed issues.
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This will probably sound stupid but, empty your recycle bin.
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Yes, because that fixes hard drive errors.
I'm doing an error scan with HD Tune Pro, but I don't know if it will find anything, or be able to fix it for that matter.
'Parently 58o is a critical HDD temperature.
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I thought it was your partition being somewhat full and the OS having a hard time creating temporary files. Hence the empty your recycle bin. :p
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Get a Mac?
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...Or get a new PC.
I seem to have fixed the problem, I had to use MaxBlast (the OEM tool thingy for the drive) and set the size in the firmware or something.
Now for the speed problem, I can't figure out what it could be.
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If you have a speed problem, whatever it may be, 99% of the time it can be fixed by reformatting and reinstalling windows.
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Well Windows is fairly new (read: months old) and I don't do stupid **** with it.
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To be perfectly blunt, if we didn't do stupid **** to windows, it would last forever. And it doesn't.
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Just worked on a laptop with the same sort of issue. Tried running about 4 different tools on HD and they either wouldn't work or said there might be a problem. Finally in a desperate attempt I tossed in a gateway tools CD and it found a problem with the drive and said it fixed it. Well I did fix it. Bought a new drive and it's working fine now.
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So Cole. . . .
Emptying the bin fixed it yet?
:wakka:
You tried googling the symptoms? (If any aside from general slowness) how many processes showing on task manager and how much cpu are they eating up?
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To be perfectly blunt, if we didn't do stupid **** to windows, it would last forever. And it doesn't.
Meh. Windows suffers from extreme amounts of self-produced entropy, and thus cannot last forever. Hardly for a few months, as we see here.
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To be perfectly blunt, if we didn't do stupid **** to windows, it would last forever. And it doesn't.
Meh. Windows suffers from extreme amounts of self-produced entropy, and thus cannot last forever. Hardly for a few months, as we see here.
Yes, it does, which is why its so easy to do stupid **** to it :p
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I've only had to reload any of my systems twice so far and both times was due to hardware. One bad hard drive, one lightning hit resulting in an infinite loop reboot that corrupted the registry before I could fix the hardware. This of course doesn't count my series of test machines over the years which were reloaded on a regular basis since they were for testing.
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how many processes showing on task manager and how much cpu are they eating up?
None. I have no problems with background processes.
Meh. Windows suffers from extreme amounts of self-produced entropy, and thus cannot last forever. Hardly for a few months, as we see here.
Not really, Windows is very stable (although not as stable as some other OSes) despite the outcry against it.
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i'm sure you've tried this, but start --> run --> "msconfig", go to startup and services tab, and disable everything except for the bare necessities, the essentials. then restart after restart, enable them one at a time, and see what it is.
or enable everything but, say, antivirus.
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I use CCleaner, and I only have CTFMON.EXE and NOD32 running on startup.
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typically i get slow downs when the cpu is too hot or a process is running overtime or the same process is taking up a huge amount of memory. Take for example f1 prix world manager game, their is an editor also a useful cheat however when your finished editing in the problem and switch it off, the window closes but the progam is still running so you keep editing with this program and shutting down until you come to play something else where the whole pc is running around bending backwards because its running at an odd speed. make sure that before you run anything memory intensive that you check all the processes. i have found an isolated problems with games before by leaving windows process manager open (cntl + alt + del > processes tab) while playing a game, another way is by going through tune up utils and it will take down your actual free memory at any given time once you active the program.
failing that, check every and all parts of your machine for a stray bit of dust or moisture build up in any of your connectors to your parts, to also be sure to clean out your psu, you really dont know how much dust collects besides i never discount the possibility of dust on the psu, and if you hadn't realized, if dust collects on your cpu cooling unit the cpu cant to its workload because of a cpu meltdown likewise the psu, beside that unit processes your power and will slow down which can not deliver your pc the power it needs, hence lower voltages meaning less power and so everything slows down, make sure your pressure clean out the certain parts for any dust.