Symptoms are compatible with (but do not necessarily imply) a catastrophic shortage of either swap space or free HDD space generally.
In a more general sense, I normally try the following on sluggish machines:
1) Unplug all peripherals, including network (except monitor, mouse and keyboard, obv !). 2) Reboot. 3) Bring up the Task Manager and look at 'Mem Usage' stats (and CPU usage, but that should be near-zero). 4) Check free space on all HDD partitions (in this case, there's probably only one). 5) If the above reveals nothing, defrag all partitions. (Tip: for badly fragged partitions it can be faster to copy most of the files off, then defrag, then copy them back on !) 6) If reboots are still slow after this has been done, disable (eg. uninstall) one by one the pieces of software which run automatically on startup. 7) If you get down to nothing and it's still slow, you either have a virus which hides itself from the Task Manager (unlikely) or a hardware problem. 8) Once the thing does start moving again, reinstall and/or reattach things gradually unless you already know what the problem was.
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Date: 2004-11-29 03:08 am (UTC)In a more general sense, I normally try the following on sluggish machines:
1) Unplug all peripherals, including network (except monitor, mouse and keyboard, obv !).
2) Reboot.
3) Bring up the Task Manager and look at 'Mem Usage' stats (and CPU usage, but that should be near-zero).
4) Check free space on all HDD partitions (in this case, there's probably only one).
5) If the above reveals nothing, defrag all partitions. (Tip: for badly fragged partitions it can be faster to copy most of the files off, then defrag, then copy them back on !)
6) If reboots are still slow after this has been done, disable (eg. uninstall) one by one the pieces of software which run automatically on startup.
7) If you get down to nothing and it's still slow, you either have a virus which hides itself from the Task Manager (unlikely) or a hardware problem.
8) Once the thing does start moving again, reinstall and/or reattach things gradually unless you already know what the problem was.