Insanity

[LumenLux]

I'm confident that PTE is not the culprit but only a victim. PTE, and - as near as I can tell - all programs are running unbearably slow on this pc the last several days. I notice a dramatic slowdown in all online activity as well as just off-line programs. Often the cursor lags badly and moves only jerkily. I was suspicious of my Netscape browser, but updating from 7.0 to 7.1 did not make any difference.

I have 3 hard drives partioned into C through G. C is not partitioned and only F is a little tight on space with 1.6 Gig free. What I am saying is I don't think a defrag is going to solve anything? But I'm sure some of you will know what may solve this drag.

I hesitate to trouble everyone here, but this forum is where the best info always seems to emerge. Also, I personally am grateful for all the "off-topic" information I learn from the problems of others that are solved here. So here's hoping some of you great friends can point me toward a solution. I am sure I would hate insanity.

[marian]

LumenLux,

If I could start off and get the ball rolling.

Can you give us the OS version, how big is the C drive, (PTE running on C?)

did this start happening "lately" after an install or deinstall or something dramatic on the system?

Compressed drives, partitioned drives, swap file big enough, etc?

Are there a lot of programs running in the background, etc? How big are the PTE shows?

Hope this starts the "think tank" going for you!

Marian

[dilemmania]

Hello LumenLux,

Wow and I thought I was losing my mind. My mouse has acting up all week, as if it is haunted! It hangs, gets jerky and jumps all over the screen. I reinstalled its driver with some improvement. I am backing up whats important and will be using GoBack(restore). I must even re-boot quite often. My up to date Norton Anti-Virus did not detect anything searching all files!

For me I believe it all began when I installed AutoIt.exe, which appears to be a great program.

Good Luck, ouch!

[jimlarkey]

For what it's worth....

If your running McAfee AV software, you might want to check with their tech support for a scan engine update. I had problems with PC arthritis, blue screens of death, eratic mouse movements, etc. The McAfee scan engine update solved the crash and eratic mouse movement. As for arthritis, it greatly improved the speed, but I find that if I disable McAfee, there is still quite an improvement in speed yet. SO when I'm doing safe computing, I disable McAfee.

I'm sorry that I lost the URL link to the update, but I'm sure if you contact their tech support, they can link you to the update.

Cheers,

Jim

[Ken Cox]

LumenLux

you never said which system is acting up

your 98

or

xp

ken

[Lloegyr]

Sounds very much like a virus to me. Had the same last week with a friends machine they were running Norton anti virus and it had not picked anything up. But when I took the hard disc out and put in my machine as second drive MY anti virus picked up 50 copies of a virus. I sorted it all out and then it was perfect again.

I use and have recommened to lots of people:-

AVG anti virus which is free and you can get all the updates free.

The site is www.grisoft.com

Look for the free version as they do other chargeable ones too

Mike

Mersea Island

[alrobin]

I was having similar problems in Win Me a while back and thought I had plenty of disk space (about 1 Gb). However, I defragged my C-drive, and it helped, so it's worth a try.

Also, if you are running Win Me (or, I think, Win 98), it might help to have a look at the system monitor which you can get to on the "Start" menu under Programs / Accesssories / System Tools. You have to set it up by clicking on Edit / Add Item and adding "Memory Manager / Allocated memory" and "Kernel / Processor Usage". While you are there you could also add "Memory Manager / Swapfile in use" to let you know whenever the system has to use the HD for overflow.

These will give you an idea about what is going on inside your pc, and why it is slowing down. If Kernel Processor Usage is 100% a lot of time, then either you don't have enough RAM, or there is some process running in the background which is "hogging" your facilities. (Or, it could be caused by a C-drive which needs to be defragged. This was what I found to be happening in my case.)

If Allocated memory is gradually creeping up and starting to overflow into the virtual memory space, then there might be a program which is not releasing RAM properly when it is closed.

If you are using Win XP, you can see the status of usage on your pc from the task manager dialogue box which you can reach by pressing "Ctl - Alt - Del" once. Then go to the appropriate tab to see the various components.

[nobeefstu]

Something else to check ... among the other above comments:

I had somewhat experienced this on an older Pc that use to pop -out/loosen its memory sticks on the motherboard.

Verify that all your installed memory is actually beng detected and reconized thru your system properties. If it shows less than you know that you should actually have .... something may well have popped out/ loosen.

[LumenLux]

Thank you each for the approaches. I just came in late after an unusuallly away-from- the-computer day. I hope tomorrow to pursue the suggestions.