Consistent Hard Drive Access When Not Idle

[Boris_yo]

My laptop is slow and i believe because of frequent access of hard drive when not idle. Laptops slows down when antivirus (MSE) updates its signature files, when i save file from web, when i open new tab or switch to another tab in Internet Explorer (but same rarely happens when i open new tabs in Firefox), when i close tab, when i open new webpage, when i scroll webpage, when i resume flash video after several minutes, when i open My Computer, when i resume music playing in Winamp after long time. Man slow down even happens when i am typing in Internet Explorer i.e in Google Translate, i type faster than characters appear on screen! There is just some kind of delay!

I thought culprit is Firefox with 70 tabs open but even when i closed 70 tabs and restarted Firefox the problem was still there. I no longer use my laptop for playing games, but when i was using it to play games, i don't rememeber any slow downs occuring. Here are statistics:





I don't think it is virtual memory because when i had 350Mb free, i still experienced slow down. As i said, previously when i played games, there were no slowdowns. Also why Internet Explorer instances take so much memory? I only have 4 tabs open.

I also had events with BSOD. It happened when hard drive was very busy and i launched applications.

My configuration:

Windows XP Home 32-bit
Intel Centrino Duo T2400 1.83Ghz
1GB RAM (2x512)
GeForce Go 7400
80Gb Hard Drive Hitachi Sata 150
Power source: UPS

 

[G33K454URU5 R3X]

Boris, looks like firefox hung (based on your screenshot) and/or you are running an older version that has a memory leak. Regardless, your machine is running slow because most of its memory is being consumed (bottom right, 'commit charge'). I would recommend that you get 2GB of RAM, update your machine to the latest version of Firefox (www.getfirefox.com) and disable unnecessary startup items using MSCONFIG.

Regarding Internet Explorer, you most likely had two other hung processes which never ended successfully - which is why they are still using memory.

 

[Boris_yo]

UDATE:

It seems this had to do less with memory and more with Internet Explorer 8. I am posting screenshot of task manager. Please take a close look at swap file, memory and especially handles.

Over 29K handles, free memory 374MB, swap file size 1.56GB



This was the moment when my system was approaching overload: over 44K handles, free ram 83MB, swap file size 2.49GB



Then i had one unresponsive tab in Internet Explorer and when clicked, sounded Windows XP's default sound like when clicking on wrong menu. I decided to terminate Internet Explorer because i could not close it. This was the result:



Over 10K handles only, 558MB free memory and 901MB swipe file size

What do you think fellow overclockers? Does that mean my Internet Explorer of version 8.0.6001.18702 has memory/handle leak? Are there any updates for this version of browser?

P.S. I did not say this but my Windows XP Home is Service Pack 2 and i did not upgrade to 3 because i had hard time updating to service pack 2 initially (some upgrades did not want to apply in real-time and when shutting down computer and updating, sometimes update stalled (not computer).

 

[G33K454URU5 R3X]

Do you have any Internet Explorer Add-ons installed? (i.e. Toolbars, download accellerators, etc) Does it only happen on specific web pages?

I would try the following:

1. Check Windows Updates for any Internet Explorer 8 Updates
2. Try resetting Internet Explorer back to default settings (Tools-Internet Options-Advanced-Reset)
3. Download and install Windows XP SP3 which may address the issue - hard to say since all we have determined thus far is that you are having problems with Internet Explorer hanging.

 

[Boris_yo]

Do you have any Internet Explorer Add-ons installed? (i.e. Toolbars, download accellerators, etc)

No addons and 2 toolbars: Roboform and Orbit.

Does it only happen on specific web pages?

Methinks it happens on any page. Also, my laptop suffers from being slow generally. What i described above was kind of overload, but usually my laptop is slow and often accessed hard drive when i take actions such as already mentioned above.

 

[kayson]

You need more RAM! What are the specs on your laptop? It seems like its a bit older. Reinstalling windows might also give you a snappier feel.

 

[chawks2]

You need more RAM! What are the specs on your laptop? It seems like its a bit older. Reinstalling windows might also give you a snappier feel.

I would vote for using a decent browser. Basically, ANYTHING other than IE will do just fine.

STOP NOW TO AVOID RANT

Additionally, EVERY W7 build I have is built without a browser. Avoid IE like the plague.

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

You need more RAM!

XP barely uses 256 MB, lol.

Sounds more like malware or bad add ons.

 

[G33K454URU5 R3X]

Reset Internet Explorer; one of those toolbars is probably causing your problem.

I'd highly recommend running at the minimum 1GB of RAM for an XP system, preferably 2GB.

Piriform makes some good disk cleanup tools such as CCleaner and Defraggler - you may wish to give those a try also.

Malwarebytes is a great program also; you should probably scan your machine to make sure it isn't infected if it's running as slow as you have stated.

 

[habbajabba]

TBH? IE8 and even at times the beta of IE9 did NOT close when you exited it and it had to be terminated. I'd look in my tsk mgr an hour later while browsing with FF and notice Iexplorer was still running-???tf. The very latest IE9 does not seem to have that problem. And that was with NO toolbars or any unnecessary addons or functionality of any kind including search suggestions etc.
I'd remove it completely, but again, some very few sites won't work at all unless I use IE.

 

[madhatter256]

In your first post there is a lot of iexplorer.exe processes running taking up a lot of memory.

Sounds like addons aren't allowing proper shutdown of IE and just bloat up in RAM/pagefile.

If you can, go to: C:\DocumentsandSettings\user\localsettings\temp and delete everything in that folder.

As old as XP is, at least 1gig of RAM is recommended, more if you play games and surf the web a lot. 512mb of RAM and even 256mb of RAM just do not cut it nowadays, maybe for a fresh install, but after installing programs, and updates, you will need more RAM.

How full is your hard drive?

If it's almost full, that's another reason it is slow. nearly full HDD can get easily bogged down when accessing swap file and loading programs, and it's worse on systems with little RAM.

 

[kayson]

XP barely uses 256 MB, lol.

Sounds more like malware or bad add ons.

When I have a choice between using less RAM or buying more RAM... I choose buying more RAM... Maybe its just me lol

 

[Boris_yo]

I have reset IE settings to "factory default". Restarted computer and at the moment everything is okay. I have noticed that always when i restart computer everything goes back to normal, but i always put my laptop on sleep. Recently i started usign hibernation also as power breaks happen sometimes. I am not sure but maybe computer becomes slower after using sleep mode or hibernation? Maybe system gets loaded and does not release RAM and decrease page file size? I also think that IE increases handles number over time. I will need to see...

I thought maybe it is something with hard drive, benchmarked it with HD Tune and AIDA64 with only Reading Speed and everything seemed in order. I wanted to test Write Speed but both benchmark softwares say that i can lose data and that such test should be done on clean hard drive.

What bothers me is result of SMART test on both benchmarks, here is a screenshot of AIDA64:



My drive has 196633 of reallocated sectors. Here is explanation from Wikipedia.

What is strange is that Status says: OK: Value is normal. How can this be normal?

This probably is not the culprit of slow system, because after restart everything is okay.

 

[G33K454URU5 R3X]

Boris_yo, you should definitely consider a RAM upgrade as part of your long term solution to slow response.

Regarding the number of allocated sectors, looks like the hard drive is getting close to about 2.25 years of use. Over time, certain sectors of the drive are not able to hold data so the hard drive reallocates the sectors to a reserved part of the hard drive, designed specifically for this purpose.

 

[Boris_yo]

Regarding the number of allocated sectors, looks like the hard drive is getting close to about 2.25 years of use.

How did you find out it is 2 years and 3 months?

 

[G33K454URU5 R3X]

How did you find out it is 2 years and 3 months?

Power on time (19969) / hours in a day (24) = 832.0416

832.0416 / days in a year (365) = 2.28 Years

 

[Boris_yo]

UPDATE

Okay this is not Hibernate's and StandBy's fault. I left laptop working for 3 days and each day noticed decrease in performance. While many say i need mroe RAM i thought about hard drive. My hard drive has a lot of reallocated sectors. I saw on SuperUser that one person was having 3MB transfer rate with his hard drive and then it turned out hard drive was stuffed (which i don't know what means but assume bad sectors).

Maybe the problem is in my hard drive? Maybe these reallocated sectors slow down my hard drive?

 

[G33K454URU5 R3X]

RAM should be part of your long term solution, as I stated previously. Since it's been a while, can you tell us how many reallocated sectors you have now as opposed to when you posted your screen shot a couple weeks ago? If the number is consistently going up, I'd swap out that hard drive.

 

[Boris_yo]

No this number did not change at all since last report.

When i attached 1.5MB 35 photos in Outlook Express and everytime tried to open that email when it was sent by going to "Sent" folder, the hard drive was constantly loading. It happened after i restarted my system, but at that time i had over 600MB of free RAM. If i had so much free ram, why would hard drive work like that?

It seems to me something can be with hard drive. Don't know, i have service pack 2.

 

[Mjolnir]

SP2? Go download SP3! It's been out for years now.. Might be an issue..