Slowness at start up and a host of other issues

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BasharOfTheAges
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Slowness at start up and a host of other issues

Post by BasharOfTheAges » Sun Jun 24, 2007 12:40 am

Ever since I built my new system back in January i've had issues with it crashing/rebooting every few times I log in (windows XP - 64bit). I've also had seemingly random corruption of World of Warcraft that has resulted in the need to reinstall and repatch 3 times total on both of my SATA HDDs. Lately, when I boot up and attempt to log in i'm noticing severe system slow down - as in it takes a good 2 to 3 minutes to verify my password and log on, run system start up routienes etc. instead of the common 30 seconds or less. Video in VLC intermittently lags dispite low cpu useage. Most windows updates fail to install properly and have done so since the begining. I've also experienced system crashes that may or may not hae been WoW related several times.


Possible concerns that may be related:
1) Initial formatting and partitioning of my system HDD failed, but was successful the 2nd time I tried.
2) I'm an idiot and neglected to install the risers on my motherboard - when it failed to start up a few times I was made aware of the problem and fixed it.

I routienely run Spybot, AdAware, and NOD32 antivirus. I defrag with Diskkeeper (used to use O&O defrag, but that wasn't 64-bit compatible) and have allowed it's automatic defragmentation mode to run while my system is on.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to troubleshoot? I'd like to get my system running in top shape if at all possible.
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BasharOfTheAges
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Post by BasharOfTheAges » Sun Jun 24, 2007 4:36 am

To clarify, the HDD light constantly being on, the unresponsiveness, the lagging video in VLC, and the 3 minutes to log on are all things that have popped up in the past week. They all (as far as i can tell) do not coinside with any high CPU useage and there is no spike in pagefile. The rest of the problems have been going on Since late January. The crashes at login have become far less frequent since then.
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Post by lister007 » Sun Jun 24, 2007 3:31 pm

It sounds initially like the hard drive, have you tried simple things like stopping any background defrag, and checking the disk for errors?. Its sounds simple but if WoW has corrupted any drivers then a system restore would sort that. Alternatively you could try posting a hijackthis on numerous sites.

My second thoughts would be the cpu, have you overclocked your CPU, if so what have you done there? Personally I have heard that xp 64 is going to lag with some programs not built on a 64 bit system, but that would not make any sense in this case with the login...if worst comes to worst try a clean install of xp....
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Post by lister007 » Sun Jun 24, 2007 3:36 pm

Have you tried this?

Bootvis

You can see which program (if any) is causing the lag at start up, there is also an optermise function if you want to try that, but that is usually for just increasing start up speed.
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Post by BasharOfTheAges » Sun Jun 24, 2007 3:42 pm

lister007 wrote:have you tried simple things like stopping any background defrag, and checking the disk for errors?.
I have checked the disc for errors, but only with the windows tool - the 3rd party stuff i was used to using for that (Acronis Disc Director) doesn't work for 64bit XP. I've also stopped the background defrag.
Its sounds simple but if WoW has corrupted any drivers then a system restore would sort that.
WoW isn't installed on my system drive any more, but I suppose there may have been a conflict when it was...
Alternatively you could try posting a hijackthis on numerous sites.
Spybot, Adaware, and Nod32 would cover this... I don't think it's a browser hijacking issue.
have you overclocked your CPU, if so what have you done there?
Nope, no overclocking done at all.
if worst comes to worst try a clean install of xp....
That's the next thing i'm going to try, but i have a sneeking suspicion it may be something more... perhaps not though.
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Post by BasharOfTheAges » Sun Jun 24, 2007 3:44 pm

also, that link gives an error.
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Post by lister007 » Sun Jun 24, 2007 5:16 pm

BootVis - Microsoft tool to provide faster XP boot and resume times
BootVis is a performance trace visualization utility that you can use with Windows XP systems. Customer research shows a frequently requested feature that users want from
their PCs is fast system startup, whether from cold boot or when resuming from standby or hibernation.

Ignore all the rubish, you can basically observe programs and drivers that cause huge spikes....instead of going through msconfig and manually trying restarts with certain things on or off.

http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/B ... -3465.html I had a second though and was thinking about the rebooting side of it, it could be the hard drive or it could some fault with the motherboard. Maybe it is not secured properly, loose connection, overclocked from the box?
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Post by BasharOfTheAges » Sun Jun 24, 2007 7:06 pm

Yea, i found the program - i'm just posting from work (both last night and now) which prevents any sort of actual attempts at me actually looking at things right now.

I've been rather busy with things and haven't had any chance to actually do any troubleshooting of my own. I tossed the thread up on here to try to get additional ideas for tomorow when i can get around to figuring out what may be wrong.
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Post by Kariudo » Sun Jun 24, 2007 8:40 pm

it may be a ram thing. If you start to use virtual memory you will get system-wide performance hits

try running memtest for a few hours.

you may also want to run msconfig to see what's in the startup list. Lots of useless things decide to put themselves on that list (like quicktime, adobe software, AIM, etc) and that can really slow down your startup.
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BasharOfTheAges
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Post by BasharOfTheAges » Sun Jun 24, 2007 9:59 pm

I'll run memtest to see what's up.

In reference to the rest of your post, i didn't install anything in the time before when the slowdown occured... I did grab spybot right afterwards just in case though. I'm sure programs weren't laying dormant for a month or two before starting to install themselves in the startup process.

As for virtual memory, i've never seen a system run with 0 of it. I have 2GB of RAM... i'm almost certain idling with the system apps i have running isn't using it all up... just the way Windows chooses to work?
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