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What's my computer up too ?

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My desktop Inspiron 530 has become painfully slow over the last year, I regularly run Malwarebytes, SpyBot, Avast, CCleaner, I have carried out countless scans etc, virtually cleared out the start up using MSCONFIG, but still it can take around 10/12 minutes + just to load and start using a browser

I have defragged the hard drive, used the CCleaner registry cleaner, etc, but nothing has improved the situation, for browsers, I use IE and Opera, but mainly Opera.

When the damned thing finally starts, it is only for around five minutes or so, and then the hard drive starts to sound like it is going into overdrive and everything just hangs, this goes on for around 10 minutes or so, I cannot reload pages or open new windows.

Today when it started to do this, I opened task manager and checked I only had one application open which was Opera, although I had 13 Opera.Exe in the processes tab, but the main thing I noticed was on the performance tab showing the CPU usage was between 50% and 95% and the physical memory usage history was running at almost 1.8gb of the 2gb memory, and all I had open was Opera and was not searching or using the browser.

Therefore, what is it this little darling is up too ? why is it working hard and sounding it is trying to compute the meaning of life, when all I have is a browser open.

Any help greatly appreciated
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Comments

  • Strider590
    Strider590 Posts: 11,874 Forumite
    edited 10 June 2015 at 8:13AM
    And with the browser not open?

    Could be as simple as a bad/unstable browser version, with a huge memory leak.

    If your running low on memory, the HDD will be working hard as Windows starts emptying RAM into the page file and if you have a full HDD, this will only exacerbate the issue.
    “I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an a** of yourself.”

    <><><><><><><><><<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Don't forget to like and subscribe \/ \/ \/
  • AndyPix
    AndyPix Posts: 4,847 Forumite
    Fifth Anniversary 1,000 Posts Name Dropper Photogenic
    When you look in task manager, is it all the opera instances that are taking up all the cpu ?
    Click on the CPU heading and it will order them highest first so you can see ..

    Andy
  • Happychappy
    Happychappy Posts: 2,937 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Combo Breaker
    Strider590 wrote: »
    And with the browser not open?

    Could be as simple as a bad/unstable browser version, with a huge memory leak.

    If your running low on memory, the HDD will be working hard as Windows starts emptying RAM into the page file and if you have a full HDD, this will only exacerbate the issue.

    Hi, the browser was open and a page loaded, but wasnt trying to refresh or open another window, it finally calms down after 10 minutes or so, and then within the hour it does it again, I don't have any scans scheduled, so just wondering what al the activity is for ?

    The memory albeit 2gb was not rally in use as there was nothing running other than Opera, which 2gb should be sufficient purely to run a browser
  • Jim431
    Jim431 Posts: 140 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 100 Posts Combo Breaker
    I had a look at the specs for Inspiron 530 and it looks like you may be running Vista with a 250Gb HDD which might have run out of space.

    Open Windows Explorer and click on the Computer folder.
    This should show your Hard Drive capacity and the free space.

    You may need to shift some of your files or old apps to another drive or memory stick.
  • Happychappy
    Happychappy Posts: 2,937 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Combo Breaker
    Hi the Hard Drive is 300gb and I have 74gb free, I have two external hard drive Seagate, one is 2 TB and the other 1 TB both using Acronis True Image, where I store photo's, music etc, so thanks, but it doesn't seem to be the capacity ?
  • Strider590
    Strider590 Posts: 11,874 Forumite
    Hi, the browser was open and a page loaded, but wasnt trying to refresh or open another window, it finally calms down after 10 minutes or so, and then within the hour it does it again, I don't have any scans scheduled, so just wondering what al the activity is for ?

    The memory albeit 2gb was not rally in use as there was nothing running other than Opera, which 2gb should be sufficient purely to run a browser

    Not if the software/browser has a memory leak..........

    Firefox used to do the same, you'd look and it'd be using over 1GB of RAM for no reason at all.

    Using 1.8GB of your 2GB of RAM, IS the problem. You need to work out what is using up that memory.
    You can do this in taskmanager and sorting the running services by memory usage.

    That said, Vista is a pile of dog dirt.
    “I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an a** of yourself.”

    <><><><><><><><><<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Don't forget to like and subscribe \/ \/ \/
  • AndyPix
    AndyPix Posts: 4,847 Forumite
    Fifth Anniversary 1,000 Posts Name Dropper Photogenic
    Strider590 wrote: »

    That said, Vista is a pile of dog dirt.

    :rotfl:True Dat !!
  • Happychappy
    Happychappy Posts: 2,937 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Combo Breaker
    Hopefully Windows 10 will sort that out on its release end of july ; ( or not.
  • Fightsback
    Fightsback Posts: 2,504 Forumite
    Use autoruns to see what else you have starting up.

    https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx
    Science isn't exact, it's only confidence within limits.
  • Jim431
    Jim431 Posts: 140 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 100 Posts Combo Breaker
    Next thing I would look at is the Services running at boot.

    Have a look in AdministrativeTools/Services
    and compare to the "Safe" recommendations at http://www.blackviper.com/service-configurations/

    Do you have a file sync program running that updates your external drives ?

    Is your anti-virus causing the problem - maybe uninstall then re-install to see if there is any difference.

    Process hacker program at http://processhacker.sourceforge.net/
    might give you more info about what processes are writing to your HDD.

    AutoRuns at https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/bb963902
    gives lists of what is running on your comp - also allows you to turn processes off...
    oh someone beat me to it - but I can recommend it.
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