PC slows down

[Knight_lithiuM]

Don't know if this is the right section for this but oh well...

When I start up a game the cpu boosts up to 100% almost instantly. The game runs smoothly for this first 5 minutes. Then it freezes for about 30 seconds. And the time that game runs smoothly decreases after some time and the game freezes longer and longer.

It hasn't really bothered me since I didn't game on my PC anymore. But now my PS2 decided to mess up... So I took some time to attempt and fix my PC. I removed almost 7gigs of crap from my hard-drive. Scanned it for viruses and ad/spyware (with norton, spybot S&D, and some online scanners).

No viruses but a lot of ad and spy stuff. Then I cleaned up my registry with Registry Mechanic (v5 I think). It found about 1500 problems and fixed all of them. Then I defragmented my hard-drive.

But none of that fixed the slowing down . So I was wondering what could be causing this...

My PC:
Windows XP home edition with sp2
Pentium 4 1,7 GHz
256 MB RAM
nVidia GeForece 2 mx 100/200

I think that those specs should be good enough to play age of empires 2 and morrowind...
Any help is much appreciated

 

[TipsySmile]

Ouch, one thing that i see, that may be causeing the problem is the ram. With ram prices pretty cheap i would strongly urge you to get a stick of 512mb. Even if your not gonna be gaming alot, it will help you out alot with other stuff you do on your Comp.

 

[KSoD]

RAM is most definatly the problem. It is recommend 256 just to run Windows XP let alone XP and a game. Thats why it slows down using too much processor and not enough RAM to play the game. Between those 2 cant handle the load and it slows down.

 

[Knight_lithiuM]

But three years ago when I bought it, every game worked perfectly fine. This is something that started around christmas and has slowly become worse...

But I have been thinking of buying some more RAM anyways so I'll buy some as soon as I've got money

 

[jjrodezno]

pc slow downs

try running spyware/adware removing software. damn things slow down my pc -_-#

 

[Private_Shon]

Well if it worked at the start something must of made it not able to work properly. Obviously its not spywear or adwear, S&D finds nearly everything. You could also try a scan disk, now depending on how big your hard drive is, this will take a while,

Open My Computer
Right Click C:\ and select Properties
Select Tools (top tab)
Select Scan Now
Tick Both boxes and press Start,
You must restart, it will turn blue and it will scan your hard drive for errors then it will try fixing them. If this doesen't work, i've seen around that GPU (Graphics) or RAM Sticks or Any Hardware for this matter could "partly" burn up, causing it to get really really bad performance yet still working. also i had a time where i had recently taken the RAM stick out, and replaced it and i haden't put it in propertly, i haden;t noticed until i opened HL2 and in the console it said Memory Heap: 512MB, but i normally have 2 sticks of 512MB that could be it as well.

 

[Knight_lithiuM]

It's probably partially burned RAM or vidcard... As I did that, disc clean thing and it didn't solve it... Thx!

 

[yosa]

As to spyware and such, it may use the same tricks as a virus, you need to be thorough in removing it, some mallware and spyware needs to be removed manually, not always fun, as long as you can identify its there though, you should be doing well; there is no single program I can name that will detect them all as well, and many will only remove some of the issue. Its possible you have an abundant amount of proccesses running simultaniously, check your task manager; of course programs like virus scaners and firewalls will slow things down, disabling these can help, most of them start on bootup and run in the background; for a check, incase it isn't spyware, start a game, alt+del out to minimise it, check your procecces under task manager, to see if anything else is very active, and see if your cpu is runing at 100%; the games you mentioned should not be taxing your system to much, any more recent games would crash that or may not even load up though. There are quite a few software issues that can account for this though, more ram as suggessted is always a good thing.

 

[Knight_lithiuM]

I went through my processes and cleared all that I didn't need (there's a site where you can see what every single thing does), and started up aoeII. Went fine first 5 mins and then slowed down again.

So I'm pretty sure it's a hardware problem.

 

[jjrodezno]

try swapping parts with another computer that's working fine. ie switch the video cards and see if the other pc slow downs, switch ram, psu's. pieces of hardware that are common to one day just stop working.