Very slow in a wierd way.

[Audette]

Hi guys,

I have a very strange problem which I hope somepne can shed some light on. My vaio S5M laptop was working quite well till last weekend when all of a sudden it started acting very slow. It took over 5 minutes for the startup and then once I click on IE or MS word or anything it would take around another 5 minutes to load up. When I was typing, the words wouldnt appear for ages.

Another problem I saw was that windows update stopped working. The icon saying its downloading updates comes up, but always remains at 0%. It wouldnt even connect to the windows update page.

In the task manager I noticed that svchost.exe was taking up most of the CPU time. But then again I guess this might be because the windows update was stuck.

I thought it might be a virus, scanned it with every possible scanner and found nothing.To be on the safe side I reinstalled windows and all the programs. After updating windows I found that it was still very slow. I read on a couple of forums that McAfee has a problem with its spamkiller which slows the PC down and also one of the windows updates were faulty. I got the fix for the windows update and uninstalled Mcafee which actually seemed to make matters worse.

I wiped the whole hard drive and reinstalled windows again. This time except for the sony applications the only other software I installed were MSOffice and Bitdefender. Now again it has a very slow startup, and after startup it takes another 5 minutes after clicking before any software is loaded. Multi tasking seems to be a big effort for the computer now, even though it might just be word, IE and media player.

Does anyone know of any diagnostic tools I can run to see if this may be something to do with the hardware or something, or does anyone has had similar experiances.

PS> sorry about the long post.

[Audette]

OK think I got it figured out... finally...

Looking at mobmeter, I realised that the processor was running at 200Hz!!!! The power settings were set to be adaptive so I would've expected the processor to change its frequency with the load... but for some reason it is not doing this. So setting it manually to run at the highest possible frequency has indeed fixed my computer in terms of struggling with multi tasking. Could this mean my power management software is corrupted?

[kee-lo_]

Hi Audette,

Could be very likely that it was just badly set or messed around by a Windows Update.

Still it shouldn't be going that much slower in adaptive mode?

[Audette]

talking about windows update, I have noticed that after a certain update (I think it was 925902 or was it 902925) my computer does act strangely. After setting the processor speed, the computer happily downloaded the above mentioned update and after that the whole system seemed to do in to a almost frozen state where it hardly could do anything at all. In the task manager I saw that svchost was taking up 95% of the CPU.

Uninstalled it and it seemed to work OK. But then the computer downloaded the next set of updates, and this time after making sure the troublesome one wasnt there, I allowed them to be installed. Again when installing the updates, the computer would nearly freeze and again svchost would take up most of the processor time.

so could it really be that the windows security update has corrupted my system? (Again??)