WinXP Professional Help

[sourboy]

My dad just had his computer reformatted with WinXP Pro, from his old system of WinME. For some reason his system lags up for 5-7 seconds here and there, locking his mouse & keyboard up during the process, then running normal again. This happens every 30-60 seconds while running any programs, notably IE (which is his only interest on this comp).

Any ideas as to why this system sputters so? I mean it's a 1+ Ghz system with 512 ram. An internet browser shouldn't stall it out. The only other program on the system, other then the XP OS is AdAware 6.0 (and I'm pretty sure it's not one of the startup programs).

thx

 

[Comraddict]

You are postive that he doesn't have any spyware/addware ? They can significantly decrease IE response. How many running processes are in Task Manager?

 

[Sanaz]

One thing to check also, in the Task Manager sort by the "CPU" column. Then watch it for a few minutes to see what your most active processes are. "System Idle Process" will probably always be at the top, so the next ones are important. If you don't know what they are, Google them.

This won't solve all your problems, but it's a starting point.

 

[Shycho]

Have you updated your graphics cards, or have you reinstalled it? have you updated winXp from windowsupdate.com

 

[Chieftess]

Sounds like it might possibly be spyware. That happened to my little sister's computer. Get Spybot S&D, and ad-aware. Those can help clean things out. Also, look for any suspicious .exe files (do a search for *.exe in run->find files & folders). Do a search in google for those exe files. Most likely, they're in your Windows and/or Program Files directory.

 

[sourboy]

I used the taskmanager & it was fine - just the minimal programs running.

The lag wasn't adware/spyware because the problems occured outside of IE as well. Also, there couldn't have been any installed because the system was just reformatted.

I tried the WinXP update & it seems to be okay for now, but I'm guessing it's a bad driver or something - possibly with the video card.

 

[ainwood]

I would have suggested actually installing XP fresh, rather than upgrading.

 

[Jeratain]

The lag wasn't adware/spyware because the problems occured outside of IE as well. Also, there couldn't have been any installed because the system was just reformatted.

Spyware can cause problems outside of internet browsing as well. And it could have easily been installed without you knowing it. Just being connected to the internet is bad enough.

I just want to double check, because you have said it was reformatted twice in this thread, but just to be sure - you deleted everything from your hard drive and installed a fresh copy of XP, right? If you reformatted, installed ME, then installed XP - that's a nono.

 

[sourboy]

ME crashed so bad that doing a recovery wasn't an option. I managed to get enough things working again to reformat, but even with the proper start up disk I couldn't get the CD-ROMs to work for a new OS install. IF I had I would have put Win98 on. The computer ended up going to a pro shop, and one month later it was returned with a fresh WinXP Pro install on it.

I thought maybe the computer was junk, my knowledge was lacking, or something unforeseen was the cause - but last week my uncle came to me about problems with his system, and guess what? Same exact problem, and he even had ME on it. What a shotty OS!

As far as the internet goes, though, I had to activate IE the day before this problem occured. The only website viewed was a tiny forum, for about 20 minutes the previous night. Adaware was the only thing installed outside of the OS when the computer was returned to us. It may have been the problem, but it wasn't part of the startup & this computer is a monster spec wise. I've had adware for some time now, and never had a problem - and my computer isn't half of what the other one is.

Don't know. Computers are finicky that way.