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#1
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PC slow for no apparent reason
Hi,
I realize my laptop is not homebuilt but I need expertise... I am completely clueless here. My laptop has slowed to a crawl for no apparent reason. It's as if the CPU itself has slowed, or acting like it is starved for physical memory. The slowness is not on the OS software level. Linux and XP are both slow. Booting is slow, bios flashing is slow everything no matter what crawls. Video is slow. I have a fast machine with 3gig memory. What could cause everything to slow? My HD checks OK on tests I've tried...I thought maybe the HD is on it's way out. But there's not noise or excessive cranking. What could it be? Tried a reformat and reinstall. Reinstall was slow - took hours were is usually takes about 1/2 hr... Lee g. |
#2
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PC slow for no apparent reason
I should add. Everything works. All processes complete but at a
crawling speed. It's not like any function is overtly broken but evrything crawls... |
#3
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PC slow for no apparent reason
goldtech wrote:
Hi, I realize my laptop is not homebuilt but I need expertise... I am completely clueless here. My laptop has slowed to a crawl for no apparent reason. It's as if the CPU itself has slowed, or acting like it is starved for physical memory. The slowness is not on the OS software level. Linux and XP are both slow. Booting is slow, bios flashing is slow everything no matter what crawls. Video is slow. I have a fast machine with 3gig memory. What could cause everything to slow? My HD checks OK on tests I've tried...I thought maybe the HD is on it's way out. But there's not noise or excessive cranking. What could it be? Tried a reformat and reinstall. Reinstall was slow - took hours were is usually takes about 1/2 hr... Lee g. Disk might have switched from dma to PIO data transport. I have "repaired" 3 systems with that error. Go into SYSTEM hardware section, and delete the disk interface. Sounds scary, but it seems oke. On reboot, repair of that follows, and with luck your dma access will be restored, and your speed back. What happened, is that windows had a disk error, and went to PIO mode because of that. Very safe, but slow. |
#4
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PC slow for no apparent reason
On Dec 16, 7:52*pm, Sjouke Burry
wrote: goldtech wrote: Hi, I realize my laptop is not homebuilt but I need expertise... I am completely clueless here. My laptop has slowed to a crawl for no apparent reason. It's as if the CPU itself has slowed, or acting like it is starved for physical memory. The slowness is not on the OS software level. Linux and XP are both slow. Booting is slow, bios flashing is slow everything no matter what crawls. Video is slow. I have a fast machine with 3gig memory. What could cause everything to slow? My HD checks OK on tests I've tried...I thought maybe the HD is on it's way out. But there's not noise or excessive cranking. What could it be? Tried a reformat and reinstall. Reinstall was slow - took hours were is usually takes about 1/2 hr... Lee g. Disk might have switched from dma to PIO data transport. I have "repaired" 3 systems with that error. Go into SYSTEM hardware section, and delete the disk interface. Sounds scary, but it seems oke. On reboot, repair of that follows, and with luck your dma access will be restored, and your speed back. What happened, is that windows had a disk error, and went to PIO mode because of that. Very safe, but slow.- Hide quoted text - - Show quoted text - Bad hard disk according to a test I can run from laptop's BIOS. You are correct - it's the disk. I get new one - still under warranty and hope that solves it. Tried what you said but seems it's bad HD. Laptop disks are not as robust as desktops imo... Thanks |
#5
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PC slow for no apparent reason
On Thu, 16 Dec 2010 14:33:04 -0800 (PST), goldtech
wrote: Hi, I realize my laptop is not homebuilt but I need expertise... I am completely clueless here. My laptop has slowed to a crawl for no apparent reason. It's as if the CPU itself has slowed, or acting like it is starved for physical memory. The slowness is not on the OS software level. Linux and XP are both slow. Booting is slow, bios flashing is slow everything no matter what crawls. Video is slow. I have a fast machine with 3gig memory. What could cause everything to slow? My HD checks OK on tests I've tried...I thought maybe the HD is on it's way out. But there's not noise or excessive cranking. What could it be? Tried a reformat and reinstall. Reinstall was slow - took hours were is usually takes about 1/2 hr... Lee g. I don't have any answers but I've seen this before with a PC. One day it got about 10x as slow as it used to be. It was old and pretty barren anyway, we didn't spend much time trying to solve it. I had a suspicion something had happened to the oscillator that drives it but nobody around had the electronics knowledge to test this. |
#6
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PC slow for no apparent reason
Loren Pechtel wrote:
On Thu, 16 Dec 2010 14:33:04 -0800 (PST), goldtech wrote: Hi, I realize my laptop is not homebuilt but I need expertise... I am completely clueless here. My laptop has slowed to a crawl for no apparent reason. It's as if the CPU itself has slowed, or acting like it is starved for physical memory. The slowness is not on the OS software level. Linux and XP are both slow. Booting is slow, bios flashing is slow everything no matter what crawls. Video is slow. I have a fast machine with 3gig memory. What could cause everything to slow? My HD checks OK on tests I've tried...I thought maybe the HD is on it's way out. But there's not noise or excessive cranking. What could it be? Tried a reformat and reinstall. Reinstall was slow - took hours were is usually takes about 1/2 hr... Lee g. I don't have any answers but I've seen this before with a PC. One day it got about 10x as slow as it used to be. It was old and pretty barren anyway, we didn't spend much time trying to solve it. I had a suspicion something had happened to the oscillator that drives it but nobody around had the electronics knowledge to test this. An "interrupt storm" can slow down a PC. It doesn't have to be an off-frequency oscillator. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrupt_storm Also, the BIOS ability to deliver an SMI (system management interrupt), can hobble a PC, and the SMM subsystem isn't even visible to Windows (you can only tell something is going on, by loss of "time"). A problem with SMM would be hard to debug, because the root cause might be the motherboard itself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Mode There are also things like "Throttlegate" (a Dell problem). http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/25/d...pters-to-clos/ Someone did a lot of analysis, to get Dell's attention. This document has been on a couple different sites, and probably gets moved because of the bandwidth it consumes when people download it. I don't know if it's still here or not. http://www.sigmirror.com/files/44490...rottlegate.pdf Some of the other causes might be easier to debug, because certain things may trigger them. For example, a computer may be held hostage by the hard drive, if say, there is a bad sector on the disk, you ask for it, and it takes ten seconds for the drive to read the sector. It might not take that much disk activity (not that many operations), to result in long stalls. I've seen a PC, pretty well frozen, trying to read a bad DVD. Those kinds of things, are easier to figure out, because something you do, tends to kick off the behavior. Sometimes it's software. I found my CD burning software, would freeze up, if there was software present which would mount an ISO as a "virtual CD". Apparently the burner software was trying to "talk" to the other piece of software. And the results weren't good. Disabling the "virtual CD" (as I wasn't using it and had forgot about it), fixed it. Paul |
#7
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PC slow for no apparent reason
On Fri, 17 Dec 2010 20:15:10 -0500, Paul wrote:
Loren Pechtel wrote: On Thu, 16 Dec 2010 14:33:04 -0800 (PST), goldtech wrote: Hi, I realize my laptop is not homebuilt but I need expertise... I am completely clueless here. My laptop has slowed to a crawl for no apparent reason. It's as if the CPU itself has slowed, or acting like it is starved for physical memory. The slowness is not on the OS software level. Linux and XP are both slow. Booting is slow, bios flashing is slow everything no matter what crawls. Video is slow. I have a fast machine with 3gig memory. What could cause everything to slow? My HD checks OK on tests I've tried...I thought maybe the HD is on it's way out. But there's not noise or excessive cranking. What could it be? Tried a reformat and reinstall. Reinstall was slow - took hours were is usually takes about 1/2 hr... Lee g. I don't have any answers but I've seen this before with a PC. One day it got about 10x as slow as it used to be. It was old and pretty barren anyway, we didn't spend much time trying to solve it. I had a suspicion something had happened to the oscillator that drives it but nobody around had the electronics knowledge to test this. An "interrupt storm" can slow down a PC. It doesn't have to be an off-frequency oscillator. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrupt_storm Also, the BIOS ability to deliver an SMI (system management interrupt), can hobble a PC, and the SMM subsystem isn't even visible to Windows (you can only tell something is going on, by loss of "time"). A problem with SMM would be hard to debug, because the root cause might be the motherboard itself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Mode There are also things like "Throttlegate" (a Dell problem). http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/25/d...pters-to-clos/ Someone did a lot of analysis, to get Dell's attention. This document has been on a couple different sites, and probably gets moved because of the bandwidth it consumes when people download it. I don't know if it's still here or not. http://www.sigmirror.com/files/44490...rottlegate.pdf Some of the other causes might be easier to debug, because certain things may trigger them. For example, a computer may be held hostage by the hard drive, if say, there is a bad sector on the disk, you ask for it, and it takes ten seconds for the drive to read the sector. It might not take that much disk activity (not that many operations), to result in long stalls. I've seen a PC, pretty well frozen, trying to read a bad DVD. Those kinds of things, are easier to figure out, because something you do, tends to kick off the behavior. Sometimes it's software. I found my CD burning software, would freeze up, if there was software present which would mount an ISO as a "virtual CD". Apparently the burner software was trying to "talk" to the other piece of software. And the results weren't good. Disabling the "virtual CD" (as I wasn't using it and had forgot about it), fixed it. Most of these couldn't apply in the situation in question: This was a dos box and the problem was evident even when doing things that didn't do any disk activity. CPU time was going somewhere. I do agree that errant interrupts could have been the cause--as I said, we didn't investigate it much. We ruled out obvious problems and then chucked it. |
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