XP Insane slowdowns - Any ideas?

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Hodgkinson wrote:
I've experienced this in the past, but just recently it’s started to become both more frequent and rather annoying. After, say, extracting a big zip file, or maybe handling photos, or a whole variety of other tasks, the system almost, within a matter of seconds, grinds to a virtual halt. For instance, it takes about 30 seconds after clicking the start menu for the menu to appear, and the only way around this is to reboot, after which the systems perks up again.

Looking in the system logs, during this time there’s whole rows of "avgntflt" timeout errors on all the background processes, including explorer.exe. (AntiVir Avira antivirus, no virus detected on full system scans)

The system is a 1Ghz PIII, 768MB RAM, XP SP2 (No internet access, so no other patches).

Now I bet our miggys don’t suffer from this problem ;-) And rebooting should be certainly easier :-)

Ideas?

Thanks,
Hodgkinson.

If it's been twelve month since your last reinstall... then I'm sorry to say, it's time to back everything up and reinstall windows. 'Tis the way of Windows.

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I have never had an XP system in constant use that has lasted more than about a year before it needed a reinstall... After the reinstall everything worked perfectly again!

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twizzle wrote:
i have xp pro, i use JKDfrag it doesnt need any disc space to work, and does a better job than microsoft`s defrag.
i also use tuneup utilitys & windows registry repair.

but after about 6months or so i still have to do a re-install? as things start to mess up/slowdown/hang/crash

Yes my experience also. Though I do usually get more than 6 months :-)

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@motorollin & Speelgoedmannetje

I would have to agree with Moto... Going Mac was the best thing I've done from a computer standpoint in the last 10 years. Certainly the PowerBook G4 I bought was dog slow compared with the PC... but once Apple moved to intel, their Hardware and OS integration offer a user experience that cannont be matched by other platforms.

My primary reasons for moving (switching in Apple parlance) were to run Logic Pro and because I was fed up with having to run so many AVs and malware checkers, a firewall and spam guard all the time... Also I spent more time trying to fix problems with the stupid thing that actually getting any work done... I was fed up with Windows... so I took the hit and bought a Mac... I wish I had waited a little as the PPC was such a poo CPU... but wow, my MacBook Pro is a little box of Joy :-)

Like Moto, I also am prepared to spend money on software I use, and in my field (Music) comercial software on the Mac is often far superior to that which is available on the Windows platform.

I have no difference between the amount of Free software available for the Mac Vs any other platform... All Unix stuff compiles without problems... plus Apple have seen fit to include a fully integrated X11 server, so *nix GUI based apps run as if first class... very nice :-)

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Hodgkinson wrote:
What do you use to clean up your registry?

Buy a Mac :-D

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twizzle wrote:
well its been about 6months now and yes you have guest it,
this week i had to re-install xp pro again  :-(

i had all the above problems again, plus my dvd +rw would not reconise any blank cd or dvd disc`s or most of my backup data disc`s? i even uninstalled and re-installed the programs to cure the problems, but to no avail,

everythings back to normal now :-) (until the next time)

Why not image your HD now in this clean state. Then in 6Months simply reimage your HD from this image, bingo clean system again :-)

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twizzle wrote:
@Bloodline

i have now put in a small 20gig hd (slave) and backed up the complete hd onto it  :-)

I think that's a seriously good idea :-)