Page 1 of help with slow computer

I have a 8 month old desktop that has 160 gig hard drive and 512 ram recently for some completely unknown reason it has started to run very slowly and freezes the fan is also constantly running, i`ve looked at the windows task manager and seem to have between 60 + 70 processes running in the back ground has this got anything to do with the speed and fan and if so how do i stop these things running?
thanks
Nick

This item was edited on Friday, 2nd December 2005, 11:30

Most likely causes:

1) You have been infected with a virus or trojan (do you have antivirus software installed and is it up to date?)
2) You have been infected with spyware (tried downloading and installing Spybot Search and Destroy?)
3) You have installed something on your PC that doesn`t seem to like it very much

Editor
DVD REVIEWER

"The Green Belt policy is a Labour Policy, and we intend to Build on it"
John Prescott

Quote:
and freezes the fan

From a hardware perspective - Maybe you should try to replace the fan (under warrenty), as the CPU gets hotter it will freeze\crash.


I quite like the Helpdesk people in a benevolent (as opposed to malevolent) way as they do some valuable work in preventing us being inundated by every halfwit who can work a phone.

sorry missing comma
"and freezes, the fan is running"
To answer previous suggestions
I am running anti virus that is up to date,
Have run spy bot but that was clean
Have defragged drive which has made a bit of a differance

Thanks for advice so far;Hw do i stop programs opening on start up? I have tried msconfig and unchecked various boxes but on a restart it opens in Safe mode and tells me to re-instate progs.
n

Swap memory out with some from another PC to test yours.



I quite like the Helpdesk people in a benevolent (as opposed to malevolent) way as they do some valuable work in preventing us being inundated by every halfwit who can work a phone.

To be honest- at 8 months old, and (I assume) still under it`s warranty)I wouldn`t be fiddling with it`s innards at all.

To me, it just sounds like a case of too many programs running at start up. click on start>run and type msconfig in the box then, when the system configuration window opens, click on the startup tab and look what is ticked. There is VERY little in there that needs to run from start up. These pages do a decent job of telling you all about it in detail.

http://netsquirrel.com/msconfig/
http://www2.whidbey.com/djdenham/index.htm
http://castlecops.com/StartupList.html.

There are other reasons that could be causing it (Do you have anything pluggedinto the USB ports? -if so, try pulling them out and see if that speeds the computer up), but if you can`t solve it with what I`ve mentioned above, I`d look to get it back from whence it came..pronto!!

Have you tried running Task Manager, clicking the Processes tab, and then clicking the CPU column twice to sort by cpu usage?

Should show you what process (or processes) is (are) eating your cpu time.

Editor
DVD REVIEWER

"The Green Belt policy is a Labour Policy, and we intend to Build on it"
John Prescott

The number of running processes is a little high but I wouldn`t be too overly concerned as I have 55 running on my machine. From experience, typically reasons for slow PCs are:-

1. Running out of virtual memory
2. CPU clock multiplier not set correctly
3. Hard disk IDE controller set to wrong speed setting
4. Weirdos who just cannot help going to porn sites no matter what the consequences
5. People downloading software from P2P
6. Not protecting PC from malware and viruses

You could try running PC Mark 4 from www.futuremark.com and more than likely someone will instantly spot the bottlenect straight away.

Quote:
4. Weirdos who just cannot help going to porn sites no matter what the consequences

rotflmfao

Quote:
I have 55 running on my machine
And I thought my 51 was a bit high :D



I Can Do Magic :D