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Unexplained Slowdown

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grs

Member
Joined
Apr 3, 2006
Location
Dublin, Ireland
For the last few days my laptop has been running slower and slower.
When I have multiple programs running usually BitTorrent, Firefox, MSN Live and Skype but not all the time, I have no idea which if any program is triggering the slowdown. I've run Adaware, Sophos Anti-Virus and Spybot all on the most recent update and they find nothing. At first I thought it maybe connected to BitTorrent updating automatically.
Ok, As I was typing this I was trying a few things with BitTorrent, I've had the same four Torrents downloading for the last few days and I've just cancelled three of them and everthing seems ok now?!?!
Has anyone else experienced a problem like this before, did you find a solution?

Discussing torrent clients = OK. Discussing what we download is not OK. Please see the difference.

nikhsub1
Forums Moderator
 
Last edited by a moderator:
never heard of the problem... but the torrent program your running might not shut down but go into background.

Try http://www.shareaza.com/

as a BitTorrent client... very nice + open source + supports other fileshareing... no spyware.
 
Oh HELL no dont do shareaza... it will just slow you down more.

TRy a defrag and a reg clean


that should fix everything up nice

Use a 3rd party defrag...I use O&O and do complete/Acess defrag... works great...



since you dont have a 2nd HDD you cant move pagefile so defragging is going to be needed EVERY day. Also set PF to same min max size to reduce fragmentation


TEmp files are still going to make it painful though.
 
How full is your hard drive? If a HD starts becoming very full with lots of downloads, it can affect the performance of your system. Also, when you speak of "performance", what type of performance? overall system activity? or internet speed? Bit torrent clients are notorious for sucking up bandwidth to do their sharing and will easily hog your connection if not properly managed.

I would also check out utorrent for a bit torrent client. I've been using it for a while now and it's been working great for me if you are looking for a new client. Very lightweight and doesn't require an install unless you want it to.
 
Re.

I ran defrag several times unsing Windows Defrag, don't know about reg clean.
I am convinced the problem was with that particular torrent file itself and not the program, once I removed the torrent everything went back to normal.
My harddrive is at its average capacity, I have a 2nd drive I put everything onto once downloaded whichs keeps the main on free. I knew Bittorrent reduced to the system tray, thats another thing I've noticed about Bittorrent, sometimes it just doesn't want to shut down except by stopping the process in TaskManager.
Anyway, thanks for the advice.
 
Sometimes on really fast downloads/uploads like Linux distros. I found my disk was bieng accessed and it had to finish the write/read before I could use that drive. It made the system feel really slow and sluggish.

Once I moved the torrents to its own drive my system bieng hogged up for read/writes went down. I even use a dedicated channel for the drives. There is also a benifit of not having to defrag the main OS drive as much. Sicne all the large writes are on a fluid drive. So when the preformance of the drive goes down, my OS is still good to go.

To keep the torrent from hogging my bandwith and flow smoothly, I do not use the setting of 0 for upload. There has to be some left for normal network talk. 80% of your upload is best. It leaves a little bit for the network to talk back and forth and surfing.

I found uTorrent is one of the better clients once you get used to how it works. I can quickly throttle how much bandwidth is used on the fly.
 
It is bittorrent that is slowing down your system. You can leave torrent overnight when you dont use computer and turn it off during the day.
No matter how much ram you have, what cpu you got and hdd ... it will come to a point of slowing everything down.
 
I dont care... I love Shareaza... and until someone makes something as nice, free and happy...

I will use it:)
 
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