Pc Help!

[jmarcellais]

I'm having a problem with my pc. Once turned on, it runs fine, smooth and fast. But after 2-3 hours of being on, my pc will bogg down and run abnormally slow.
I run anti-adware and anti-virus software and find nothing. I un-installed all un-necessary programs. Even leave the cover to the chassi off and a small external fan run on it to keep it a cool as possible. Still getting the same reults.
I don't know what it could be. Any suggestions? Any help will be greatly appreciated.

-Thanx

Joe
Dallas, TX

 

[Lone Wolf]

Joe, if you are operating a Win9.x based operating system, it might account for the sluggish performance. Slow performance like this can be caused by different things and it would really help to know your OS and hardware specs.

Did this problem occur out of the blue or has this been going on for quite some time?

 

[beedubaya]

As Lone Wolf said, if you are running Windows 9x/Me, you will notice your system running increasingly slow the longer you go without a reboot. There's no wonder the name Microsoft has a negative stigma after the crap they producted with those DOS/Windows hybrid operating systems.

 

[jmarcellais]

I'm running Windows XP Home, I bought this pc in April. not sure if the problem is hardware or software

 

[Lone Wolf]

jmarcellais, i'm surprised that you're having these types of symptoms with WinXP.

For starters, I would point out that this can typically be caused by applications running in the background and consuming too much of your resources. One area to look is under your anti-virus options. If you have it set to automatic scan your hard drive w/out the user prompt, it might be running in the background silently and thus be causing your sluggish performance.

The other thing to try is immediately when you notice the PC starting to get sluggish, do a Ctrl-Alt-Del and look in your task manager and try to see if there are any processes or apps that are consuming a lot of your resources. It might help.

 

[rakesh_1024]

Type services.msc in Run dialog box and disable the services U donot need.
Disable Syster Restore Utility in case U don't have any use of it.
Download Tuneup utilities for a complete Tuneup.

 

[Apokalipse]

maybe the longer you have it on, the more paging (virtual memory) it uses, and paging is always going to be slower than using normal RAM

 

[jmarcellais]

thqnx guys, i'll try these things out and let you know how it goes. Thanx again!

 

[jayhawker01]

Is this a custom built machine?

 

[Lone Wolf]

maybe the longer you have it on, the more paging (virtual memory) it uses, and paging is always going to be slower than using normal RAM

That's not quite how that works. The kernel does not grab the data from the 'swap file' first... it's designed to always retrieve it from the physical memory first - RAM since it's much faster.

Virtual memory (or swap file since were talking about an NT based OS) is transferred to the cpu on a as-required basis. Meaning that Windows will use as much or as little page file depending on such variables as hardware systems and what applications it's running.