~ Diagnosing a Slow Computer ~

 By:  William P. Flinn, Updated Friday, April 06, 2007 06:40 PM
(C) 2006 - Not authorized for reproduction or sale without author's express written permission

"My Computer is Really Slooooooow!"

You may have heard before, from me or others, about doing periodic maintenance on your computer, including running Disk Cleanup and Defrag. These built-in tools will help speed up your computer and make disk operations more efficient. You may also know that viruses and malware can slow your computer down. So just to be extra careful, you keep you keep your antivirus definitions up to date, and do regular virus and spyware scans. An overly full hard drive makes it hard for your virtual memory to work efficiently. You need disk drive space so that your physical memory can “swap” paging files with the virtual memory set aside on your hard drive. So you clean off some unwanted programs and archive those documents and pictures that you want to save but no longer use frequently.

You have checked all those things, so why is your computer still running slow and sluggishly? Now it may be time to do a little troubleshooting to find out what is slowing down your system. You could have an application causing problems, or it could be a virus or other malware. A recently applied patch could also be causing an application to run improperly. To find out what is going on, you will have to take a look at graphical performance indicators as well as a list of running processes. This is tricky, because even if you see which process is causing your problems, you won’t know if it is good (normal) or bad (caused by a virus) unless you do some additional research and find out what they are. Even I don’t pretend to know what they all are just by looking at them. I spend a lot of time researching processes to find out what they are and how to fix them if they are causing a problem. Troubleshooting computer problems is not always easy – that’s why us computer geeks aren’t worried about job security quite so much :) I have listed some resources below for you, however, so you won’t have to spend so much time researching these things.

Two things that will help you find out why your computer is performing poorly are CPU usage and physical memory usage. Windows has some built in tools to help you with this as well. The tools mentioned in this article will help you quantify your performance, and even tell you which processes in your computer are hogging all your CPU time and memory space.

Perfmon:

One tool built into Windows XP systems is a tool called “Perfmon” which is short for performance monitor. To bring up the perfmon utility, click on Start, Run, and type in perfmon. This tool allows you to select a variety of performance counters to evaluate system resource usage. Some typical counters you will want to look at are % Processor, and Pages/Sec. % Processor will tell you how hard your processor is working. 100% processor usage obviously means that your processor is driven to the maximum. Don’t be too concerned about occasional spikes that reach 100%. The CPU staying at 100% usage is usually a sign that there is a problem. Don’t get too concerned if your processor is averaging as much as 50% usage. A processor that is being utilized as it should be is averaging about 60% - 70% utilization.  Most home computers average less than 10% utilization, which actually means that the CPU is under-utilized.  Just make sure it isn’t pegged at 100% all the time; constantly high processor resource usage is a key performance indicator telling you of a potential problem.

Pages/Sec is an indicator of disk reads or writes to resolve instances where data was needed, but wasn’t in physical memory. Constantly high numbers of Pages/Sec might indicate that there is a problem, but not necessarily related to memory. Be sure to look at other counters to determine if there are other memory issues, such as the Memory: Available Bytes and Paging File:% Usage counters. Balance this information against physical memory installed in your machine and the amount of free disk space. Too little of either may be causing your problems.

 

Task Manager:

A similar tool for looking at computer performance is the Task Manager tool. Task Manager will give you graphical displays of CPU and memory usage, with the added ability to see exactly which processes are using the CPU, the process ID, and the ability to kill non-responding applications. Additionally, you can also look at graphics for network usage To bring up the Task Manager, simply hit the CTRL – ALT – DEL key sequence, and click the Task Manager button.

The Task Manager will give you a good graphic indicator of memory and CPU usage. Monitor these graphs for a few minutes and see if you see any trends, and look for CPU usage that is spiking or staying constantly at 100%. Spikes are normal. Constant 100% usage means that you have something driving your CPU too hard. Once you bring up Task Manager, click on the Performance tab to see the graphs.

 

Once you know how your CPU and memory are being driven you can look at the list of processes. Click on the Processes tab to see a list of running processes, their process IDs and the percentage of CPU usage each is using. You can sort the processes to see those that are using the most CPU to the least by clicking on the CPU column of the processes list. If you see a process that seems to be hogging a lot of CPU resources, end the process and see if performance improves. Try restarting the program that is running that process, or even restart your computer and see if performance improves.

 

If you want to see running applications, click on the Applications tab. You can see if they are running or not responding. Shut down the non-responding applications and then look at performance. Non-responding programs can sometimes consume a lot of resources and need to be shut down to release the resources that they are tying up.

 

Diagnosing a Slow Computer – Checklist:

If your computer is running slowly and sluggishly, there are a number of things that can be causing the problem. Viruses, malware, a hard disk that is too full, too many temp files (clutter), or errant processes running on your machine and hogging resources. You almost need to find out what it isn’t before you can find out what it is. Viruses, malware, too many temp files, or even an overly full disk drive can cause this problem. Here is a checklist of things to do to help speed up your system:

• Is it a virus? Perform a virus scan and remove any offending viruses.
• Is it other malware? Scan for malware and spyware and remove the malware.
• Is it disk clutter? Run a Disk Cleanup routine.
• Is my disk drive too full? Clean off unneeded programs and files
• Is my disk drive too fragmented? Run Defrag.
• Are my CPU and RAM bogged down by hungry processes? Run perfmon and/or Task Manager and find out what is consuming all the resources.
• Are too many processes running? Shut down some programs – if that helps, it is time to upgrade memory.

 

Additional Resources:

• Microsoft: Pages/Sec Counter Explanation
• Microsoft: Windows XP Task Manager Overview
• Sysinternals: Process Explorer (Freeware)
• Answers That Work: Process List Definitions
• Microsoft: Restore Your Computer’s Performance with Windows XP
• Tech Republic: Identify Services Within Processes (tasklist command)
• Microsoft MVP Article:  Virtual Memory in Windows XP

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