Posted on 02/25/2012 9:46:12 PM PST by fieldmarshaldj
I've had more and more difficulties with accessing webpages (serious slowdown and pages freezing up) along with rapid bumping-off of being logged in to different websites (such as IMDb, eBay, etc.), for which I should be permanently logged in (or at least in eBay's case, for 24 hours). I go through maybe 5-10 pages or less and I get inexplicably knocked off. Again, it's not localized to just a few websites, but across the board. This computer is less than 2 years old, doesn't have a lot of memory used (or junk cluttering the system).
I have Kaspersky anti-virus and ran a scan, but it shows no viruses. I did a defrag and it was no help, and also a checkdisk scan at start-up, and that also did nothing to improve the situation.
Any ideas as to what is wrong with my computer ? I am stumped. Thanks.
Finding a virus probably means that you don't have hardware problems.
Definitely run TDSSKiller.
See how your performance is doing afterward and if everything looks back to normal, (you're going to hate me for saying this) run Malwarebytes again, full scan on just C drive.
looks like MalwareBytes got it .. I just updated mine ... saves the day often.
Santorum and Newt campaigns are now active in MA and VT. Are you getting much campaign noise on your local media and mail in TN for 3/06?
I do not see polls for TN anywhere. Romney will get 3rd place just like OK?
It’s probably better to get that extra memory right when you buy the computer. More than likely we’ll get a new computer within a year, so little point in springing for that now for a 2-year old computer.
As for the performance score, it reads a 4.1.
I ran the TDSSKiller, it scarcely took long at all and didn’t find anything. I also went ahead and ran the Malwarebytes again overnight (took just under 7 hours this time) and it spotted nothing.
However, I’m still having performance issues (slowdowns, etc.), although the frustrating concern of getting bumped off password-required sites I haven’t attempted to check, although I’m about to (oddly enough, it hasn’t happened on FR, but has on eBay, IMDb and other lesser-visited sites).
No, there hasn’t been many campaign ads (beyond some local judgeships), although I haven’t frequented the local channels, anyhow. No mailers, either, which is odd. I do expect Santorum to carry TN (Newt may place 4th). TN has ceased to become a battleground state, anyhow. Absent Al Gore putting the state (barely) into the rodent category for President (and Carter in ‘76), TN is a GOP state now, and that has gone clear down-ballot. The National Democrats are absolutely toxic in this state.
must be distressin’ for the locals to know that their country is being wrecked but a bunch of cosmopolitan liberal Yanks.
This Yank sympathizes with them.
That is the troubling part for me, that's way too long for a newer machine imho.
TDSSKiller is a very fast running scan, takes less than 5 minutes on my old clunker.
Good to hear that it found nothing because I was suspecting a *root kit* virus screwing up the registry.
Maybe you need more RAM memory, but I think 3 Gb just running Malwarebytes should be adequate and not require 7 hours of run time.
Regular dynamic memory is usually constrained to 16 or 32 gb using either 4 memory sticks at 4gb each yielding 16 GB or 4 sticks at 8 GB each yielding 32 GB total. That is an extremely large physical memory size for personal computers.
Please note that some Intel motherboards are capable of holding SIX memory sticks.
Dynamic memory stick size is critical to understand properly because it determines your hibernate file (hiberfil) size which is the same as your dynamic memory size.
Your swap file should be large enough to contain everything that you have running and is usually set as 1.5 times your dynamic memory size but if you have enough physical memory to contain everything that you are running your swap file doesn't have to be that large.
I would recommend that you cut down on your ‘swap file’ size to about 4 gb and set it using the ‘custom size’ setting with BOTH the minimum and Maximum size being the same. I also recommend if possible placing your swap file onto a different hard drive than your boot or C: drive.
Windows by default sets up an fairly small swap file with different minimum and maximum file sizes. When windows first starts up it will create a minimum size swap file and then gradually increase it as more programs get loaded which results in a highly fragmented swap file along with all of the intertwined files on that same disk also getting fragmented. I have 16 GB of dynamic memory along with a swap file size of only 4 GB and I have plenty of ‘free memory’ available. I would recommend that you delete all but the last two ‘restore points’, do a disk clean up, turn off the hibernate mode, and then delete the no longer used ‘hiberfil’. After all of that, then do a defrag using a program like ‘perfect disk’. Win 7 has a lot of tasks running in the background and it is constantly opening and closing various log files while often keeping several copies of each file. These are usually small files but with multiple copies being created and deleted the hard disk tends to get fragmented very quickly.
My own system runs Win 7 Pro on a Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 motherboard with an AMD Phenom II 6 core 1090T black edition processor. I am using FOUR 4GB memory sticks for a total of 16 gb of memory to be updated to 32 gb when some extra cash comes in.
My boot drive is a Patriot Pyro 60 gb SSD which reads over 550 MB per second.
My ‘working’ disks are SEVEN 1.5 TB hard drives + ONE 2 TB hard drive + two 3TB hard drives. In other words a pretty high end machine. I keep all of my hard drives other than the 60 gb SSD boot drive defragmented on a weekly basis.
I have a very highly tuned system but from time to time I still experience various slow downs and pauses while WIN 7 performs background maintenance tasks.
If you are using a Solid State Disk (SSD) I would recommend the following site for tuning tips: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/70822-ssd-tweaks-optimizations-windows-7-a.html SSDs are very tricky about proper alignment and suffer greatly if the drive isn't formatted and aligned prior to OS installation.
I also recommend the following site: http://thessdreview.com/ssd-guides/optimization-guides/the-windows-7-optimization-guide/ for general win 7 tuning tips.
I personally don't use any windows ‘restore points’ but rely instead on periodic backups using Acronis True Image. If you don't have a backup/recovery program like Acronis and have to rely on Windows to make periodic restore points be advised that windows often creates more restore points than what we are aware of while deleting the oldest ones based on time and space constraints which further adds to the fragmentation problems.
If you aren't using the hibernate function, then disable it and delete the hiberfil which takes up as much disk space as your memory size.
There is simply no getting round defragging your boot drive if it isn't a SSD. If your boot drive is a SSD and it is correctly set up win 7 uses it's ‘Trim’ function to AUTUMATICALLY keep fragmentation from happening. One should never defrag a SSD and especially don't regularly defrag it.
I've seen various tuning tips which state that 16 to 32 MB is sufficient. IE by default sets up a large number for retention and recommends 20 to 50 MB be reserved with a maximum of 1025 MB (1TB) possible. The larger your hard drive, the larger the number set by default.
Keeping too many Temporary Internet Files leaves them scattered across the hard drive which along with the adding of new files and deleting of old files creates a highly fragmented hard drive.
I often delete all of my old temp Internet files before shutting down or doing a defrag. I also recommend if possible putting the Temporary Internet Files on a different hard drive that your Boot or C: drive.
New sounds good to me. Just for fun, try running the CPU gadget with the two dials to see what percentage of its ram your machine is using.
I’m still not sure what’s wrong. There is clearly a lot of junk in the system, as I was observing the scan. The problem, too, is that the computer is acting no different than before. The slow loads, the getting knocked off log-ins. I had to borrow the old computer (which has its own problems and is almost 5 years old) and the websites were loading like lightning by comparison (although the substantial downside is that it has a nasty habit of “blacking out” while in the middle of doing something — and the history cache from the time it was turned on, all logged-in websites, are dumped from the memory. This was one reason I stopped using it in favor of the newer computer in the past several months). If it costs more than a few hundred bucks to correct the problems, it’s simply better off buying a new machine.
I forgot where that was, since I don’t much play around or look at that. That’s under Task Manager, I believe. I’ll note what it says (although it changes from moment to moment)...
CPU usage: ranges from 1 to 20%
Memory: 1.44GB
Physical memory (MB)
Total 2806
Cached 1352
Available 1340
Free 34
Kernel memory (MB)
Paged 242
Nonpaged 84
Does that show what you’re asking or is it something else ?
Some of those temp files look like junk. Cookies to websites I only visited once, in some cases weeks or months ago. I deleted some of them by hand. The retension memory was set to 250 MB, the high end of the recommended amount.
As to your prior post, which is obviously comprehensive, I openly admit to not being an expert on those things of a more complicated nature, so I’m not entirely sure how to attempt any alterations without causing problems (or if it is even necessary to do). I’m more or less simply puzzled why my internet connection is acting so subpar (despite the fact two computers are hooked up to the same wireless connection, and the older and ostensibly more troubled one has a far easier time navigating websites than this one).
Once the properties screen comes up, then click on Disk Cleanup which will clean out a bunch of no longer needed files. This will present a list of various files which you can mark for deletion by putting an x in the box alongside the ones you want to get rid of. Be sure the recycle bin is also marked.
After you finish up the cleanup, then go to the tools section on the ‘properties’ page. While in the tools window, click on ‘Defragment Now’ to consolidate all of the free space into a contiguous chunk. This will make it easier to avoid creating new fragmented files while making file access faster on the older files if they were fragmented.
A fragmented hard drive is the slowest part of reading and writing files because it takes much longer to read all of the fragmented parts of a file due to the disk head moving back and forth across various parts of the disk as opposed to reading and writing an unfragmented file when it can all be accessed with little or no head movement is much faster.
If possible, add a second hard drive and move your swap (page) file and temporary Internet Files to that drive. If you need help doing so, reply to this thread when you have a second hard drive to move these files to and I will help you.
When one doesn't have enough memory to keep everything in memory seldom or little used portions are swapped out to the page file to make more room to load or process files and data. This access to the swap file is slow when parts have to be swapped out just to fit new things into memory.
This often causes large movements of the disk heads to position then across the various parts of the hard drive. The situation is made worse when the hard drive is fragmented. THE BEST SOULTION IN THIS CASE IS TO SIMPLY PURCHASE MORE MEMORY AND IT CURRENTLY VERY AFFORDABLE.
How many memory sticks and which size to buy depends on how many memory slots your motherboard has and how many open slots you have.
I seem to remember you mentioning that you had 3gb of memory and therefore I suspect that you have an Intel board with either three or six slots.
If you have six slots with three open, then simply but three more sticks the same as what you already have. If you only have three slots, then you should replace all three sticks with three other sticks of at least 2gb each but preferably 4GB each of the required type.
Most of the memory manufacturers have a website where you can enter fory computer make and model and they will tell you what memory is compatible with your machine. You can either purchase from them or buy online from Newegg which may be cheaper.
Anything you can do to avoid disk access whether it is additional memory or keeping your hard disk defragged will greatly speed up your machine.
I can tell you right off the bat that I did a disk cleanup the other day and a defrag recently (I double-checked a moment ago, it’s at 0% - nothing to defrag). As far as I can tell, there doesn’t seem to be any memory problems. Still, the drag and errors surfing so many websites remains baffling and frustrating (and when I have just a few tabs open, clicking on a given website and watching as it wreaks havoc with a previously open tab to another website).
That’s interesting there, if your browser is rying to access multiple webdites via the tabs at the same time, then all of them aer competing for the disk access time.
The more tabs that are open has each tab trying to download at the same time which would involve not downloading and storing the new data but also deleting the old dats once you are at the storage limit.
Consider that if your browser it trying to download from several different sites or pages then all of that data has to come in over the internet which slows things down a lot not even counting the disk access.
I use IE9, but I don’t let it open every link on a page. If I want to open another tab, I will do so but I don’t let things happen without me letting them happen.
I think I didn’t explain it clearly... Let’s say I have the first webpage open, which is the “Latest Articles” page on FR. That is fully loaded and hence not running (unless I’m hitting refresh). Tab #2 will be FR’s “My Comments” page. That I will also have fully loaded and not running (although it’s not unusual for me to hit refresh on both tabs). Then I may have tab #3 open to allow me to browse other websites, say, Amazon.com to look for sale items. Now, remember, both tab #1 & #2 aren’t running. They’re already loaded. I’ll have the Amazon page running, and it’ll end up taking maybe 2 minutes to load (and during which time, I’ll probably get an error message at the bottom stating “page is not responding”) and sometimes, by its own accord, it will start to refresh one or both (or just any other random) tab(s) I have previously open but am not currently on (which makes no sense).
Basically, none of that should be happening. It shouldn’t be messing with a tab I’m not currently on, and secondly, it shouldn’t be taking so long to load the page of a website for which I’m on (and getting those error messages) and freezing up (which is also a frequent occurance). Nevermind logging in to a website and getting knocked off almost immediately. It didn’t happen on this machine until recently and the older computer (which has problems of its own, namely all the memory is considered used up, even though there’s nothing in it to have that be the case) works much faster and efficiently while doing the exact same things I described above.
All in all, a big pain in the ass.
When I switched my laptop to Win7 from XP, but before I added more RAM, the memory meter would run around 60%-80%. When it got into the 80s and higher, it would do the same symptoms you've described.
Doubling the RAM to 4GB got the mem usage percentages down below 40% and now it runs fine, with none of the previous problems.
Something might have broken with your machine, but my guess is your problems will go away with more memory and you could get a few more years of use out of it.
DJ if your not comfortable doing the RAM upgrade it doesn't take a geek to do it. Find a friend who has upgraded their own and they can likely do it for you. Just make sure the new chips match your current ones in type and in capacity.
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