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Extreme Slow Downs

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WeaponX

Member
Joined
Sep 12, 2001
Location
Ft. Worth, TX
My secondary computer, a PII 300 w/ 128 MB RAM will randomly experience huge slow downs in where doing the simplest tasks such as moving the mouse will lag. It's running on Windows XP Prof. I've check the ram and there's usually less than 20 MB when this is happening. I can have no applications open and still watch it lag. Why is this happening now if I didn't happen for over 6 months with WinXP? What can I do to fix it? My last resort would be to just buy a whole new system.
 
I'm a tad confused. It usually happens when you have under 20 megs free, but yet it happens when no aplications are open??
There has to be something taking all your resources.

Is your HDD being accessed when this happens??
 
Another tip: run with the Task manager open for a while, with the processes sorted by CPU load. Then you can see what process is making your system so slow when it happens; that's how I found out about the Automatic Indexing Service
 
I've checked my free RAM and it is usually below 20 MB when the slow downs are happening. But there are no programs open. There are a lot of processes running though.
 
I looked and there were only a few processes that were running constantly. But they were very small, like less than 1 MB each. WIth a 128 MB of RAM, that shouldn't be much of a problem. I downloaded TweakAll and cleared the RAM when the slowdowns started happening again. But it didn't fix the slowdowns at all. So I said what the hell, formated my hard drive, and installed Win98. After about 5 min of using Win98, the same thing started happening again. WTF!! I'm guessing something is wrong with my hardware not the OS.
 
It's more than enough on Win98 with NO programs open and a clean hard drive. Clearing up the RAM in XP didn't stop the slow downs even when no other programs were open either.
 
If you had a P4 I'd say you had a big heat problem which in turn made your CPU throttle....but you don't, so it has to be something else...

Wondering: Are you sure it is the system itself slowing down, and not just the videocard which mysteriously slows making it seem that the system itself is?
 
I have an STB Velocity 128 in this system...it's a P.O.S. as far as I can tell....How would I tell if it's really messed up?
 
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