laptop is really bogging down

etsisk said:
what processes are running? Shouldn't that show up what's sucking up cpu time?
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Processes can be hidden from task manager. Yesterday my office desktop had the disk seeking continuously and was swapping it's brains out WITH 1GB of RAM and I didn't see anything using it. It was prolly the security (corporate department) software or some other nonsense.

I complained that the 3 year old PC with 512MB and Win2K was barely usable. They give me a new one with 1GB and XP and it's a lot worse.

It's also a crappy Dell. Don't get me started. ...too late...the video card is defective. The answer? "We won't order any with the cheap video card any more." That does me a whole lot of good.

I have 2GB at home. Sad. I have much better stuff at home.
 
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Someone suggested running MSCONFIG. I would do that, Beth, and see if anything funny is loading. Specifically, in the Start Up tab, anything that begins with "run=". Those are usually not good. If you post what's loading there, I'll bet you'll get a bunch of good suggestions on what to uncheck.
 
If you don' make any progress here, try a visit to www.hijackthis.com (I think that's the URL) ... run their program and post the results back up. Some good help there as well.
 
it did a self check for me on dslreports.com and said I belong to src.org

I'm actually on adelphia. could this be a problem?

I don't think it's showing me my own speeds, but what customers are reporting?
 
GUESS WHAT??

taking that %^&*&^% Trend PC off my computer (the anti-virus, firewall, security etc. just put my computer back to normal.

bastids.
 
That's great, Beth, but....

You really do need an anti-virus program on the system. Look at Nod32. I've been using AVG on two of my machines and it's worked fine.

Stay away from Symantec/Norton. It's as bad as what you had.
 
I put in spy sweeper simultaneously with the boot of the POS system.

what I think was causing the problem was its constant insistence that another computer was trying to hook into mine. it literally NEVER went away. that was from when I tried to file share off MSN mSGR - it set something off and I couldn't get rid of it.

if I tried to click it off - it came back again, and always made my computer pause when it did so. and then I started ignoring it and leaving the warning up 24-7 which I think bogged things down.
 
woodstock said:
I put in spy sweeper simultaneously with the boot of the POS system.

what I think was causing the problem was its constant insistence that another computer was trying to hook into mine. it literally NEVER went away. that was from when I tried to file share off MSN mSGR - it set something off and I couldn't get rid of it.

if I tried to click it off - it came back again, and always made my computer pause when it did so. and then I started ignoring it and leaving the warning up 24-7 which I think bogged things down.
Click to expand...

Trend was prolly constantly stealing interrupts and focus to get your attention. Good riddance.

Ditto on nod32.
 
woodstock said:
what are "stealing interrupts and focus"?

it did constantly nag me about stuff.
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The operating system goes about it's business giving every running program a slice of time to do what it needs to do. The interrupt system is built in the CPU so a device can say, "HEY, NEED TO RUN NOW!" mostly for things like the I/O ports where if they can't offload the new data in time it can disappear.

Imagine when Trend got its slice of time it said, "HEY! THIS IS IMPORTANT! This is attack number 2,345,678,900,001 and I gotta know what she wants to do about this!" A process can claim a priority and get more CPU cycles. More to the point when it's polled it can say, "Nothin' from me, boss, thanks," or it can run off and do busywork. More likely in this case when the scheduler came around to Trend, Trend always went off and did pointless work. Whatever CPU time gets comes from everything else. So everything you do gets slower.

Just in normal operation these "security suites" are getting in the middle of everything - every disk access, every network packet. Even when they check and think all is well they slow down the system. So you need the equivalent of a Supercomputer just to play Solitaire. This is progress.
 
that's what it sounds like I guess. it was maddening to deal with. I didn't want to take it off, because it's supposed to be a decent system. but the spysweeper I just put up seems a lot better and doens't slow anything down.

the next Q is - wil Trend Micro give me my money back for a crappy system I paid for?
 
I, on the other hand, have had really bad luck with SpySweeper. It brought one system to its knees. Off it went.... not to darken my computer again.
 
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