This is weird, and it's driving me nuts.
I've had Vista Home Premium 64 bit working on a P6600 system with 2gb of system
RAM and Nvidia 8500GT 512mb. C: drive has about 122gb free out of 189; drive H
has about 171 gb free out of 465.
Well, Vista is the crappiest OS Redmond has ever produced, whatever improvements
the SPs may or may not give. However, it's been running fine (once I got over the initial
UA silliness).
On Wednesday, though, everything went pear shaped. It took a couple of minutes to
get to the log-in screen, something previously taking 30 seconds. Then when I clicked
the password box, it was another 30 seconds or so before I could start typing - there
was just a temporary freeze. After typing in the password, the system froze again for -
well, over ten minutes - before hearing the 'ping' Vista gives on startup.
I sat down at the PC and everything I tried to do didn't work. Sometimes Firefox seems
to start up twice, and the two interfere with each other, so I go into Task Manager and
shut them down from the processes screen and start again. It took at least five minutes
for Task Manager to appear on screen. Firefox, according to Applications tab, wasn't
running. Nothing was, in fact. Clicking from the Applications tab to the Processes tab
caused another long delay - half a minute or so. There were two instances of Firefox,
so I shut them down. More delays, shut down Task Manager, tried to start up Firefox
again - delay, delay.
So I shut down Vista - more dela-a-a-ays...started up again. Same problem.
Shut down again, started in Safe Mode. Things running fine in Safe Mode - but I can't
remember if they were slow.
Shut down and started up normal - delays, delays, delays. But on Thursday, I needed
to get work done so I persisted and eventually, things seemed to settle down -
Photoshop and Bridge were loading files and I was editing them, everything operating
normally.
Infuriating that starting up last night produced the same delays. But again I persisted
and things settled into the usual situation. So I decided to leave the machine on all
night.
Of course when waking up this morning Vista was as slow as previously, though now -
about three hours after I woke it up again - we seem to have something like normality.
I don't suspect a virus, 'cos I never open emails except from trusted sources, and I
used Thunderbird and Firefox which haven't leaked now for two years. However, I've
downloaded a free AV package and will do a sweep next.
I don't see why such a sudden drop in performance could be anything to do with disk
fragmentation, especially the fact that it seems to resolve itself after a couple of hours -
it it was disk issues, wouldn't they stay around permanently?
I recently - though several days before the slowdown - downloaded new graphics
drivers from Nvidia.
Main suspect is Windows Upgrade - I usually leave this turned off but I turned it on to
upgrade and then forgot to switch it off again, and it wanted to re-boot on Tuesday but
I wouldn't let it.
So after the AV scan, I'm going to go back a couple of restore points, and see if that
solves the problem.
But I'm whistling in the wind, really; has anybody out there any better or more solid idea
of what this could be?
Thanks
Steve, Southampton, England
|
Similar Threads
Linear Mode
