[The Impresario]

About a month ago, I reformatted my Hard Drive. Then installed security programs:

1. Zone Alarm
2. AVG

These are the only applications that run when Windows XP is started. Back then, it performs really well, takes only about 30 seconds to get from boot-up to usable condition. AVG and Zone Alarm's icon are immediately present at the system tray. That's how I know if it is in usable condition.

Then these last few days, the 30-second startup became a long 1 and a half minutes.. Zone Alarm's icon takes forever to appear at the system tray, and when I run memory-hogging applications, it lags and sometimes freezes..

The other day, it just became SOOO slow that I had to restart it. When it reached the desktop, it froze again.. then a BSOD appeared, I didn't get a chance to see what's in it because it, like, flashed just a second.. then it restarted. Then it came into the booting screen which showed something like:

Searching for boot record from floppy :
Searching for boot record from IDE-0: OK/

Then it just froze. I hit the restart button on the CPU, then, it appeared again..

Yesterday, I cleaned my CPU, making sure it's free of dust. Then I tried booting up the PC. It boot up quite well, but still, startup programs take forever to load. Then just now, memory-hogging programs lagged like crazy.. I brought up Task Manager and saw that svchost.exe was using about 60,000K of memory, much higher than normal..

Could someone help me on this?

Windows XP Pro SP2
Intel Pentium 4 2.26 Ghz
378MB of RAM
40GB HDD / 18 GB of Free Space

[Advertisements]

You need more RAM for better performance.
Otherwise:


I found much faster startup when I replaced Zone Alarm with Comodo firewall.
Zone Alarm has become bloated.
The latest review also recommend Comodo.

http://www.matousec....rewalls-ratings

Comodo:

http://www.majorgeek...wall_d5033.html

Edited by latigid, 25 September 2007 - 05:39 AM.

[latigid]

You need more RAM for better performance.
Otherwise:


I found much faster startup when I replaced Zone Alarm with Comodo firewall.
Zone Alarm has become bloated.
The latest review also recommend Comodo.

http://www.matousec....rewalls-ratings

Comodo:

http://www.majorgeek...wall_d5033.html

Edited by latigid, 25 September 2007 - 05:39 AM.

[The Impresario]

Maybe I'll switch to Comodo Firewall if I find no other solution to the lag problem..

The system is working fine with Zone Alarm back then, no lags, fast startup..

I was wondering if there is anything I can do to bring back that speed and avoid the dreaded BSOD and freezes..

[Neil Jones]

378Mb of memory is not bad, but its a little low for optimum performance (which for XP starts at 512Mb when you add virus scanning), and 18Gb free of a 40Gb HDD is also on the low side.
Your problems may be caused by that hard drive depending on its age - stranger things have happened.
Issues with the power supply are also possible.

Edited by Neil Jones, 25 September 2007 - 03:32 PM.

[The Impresario]

so.. a failing power supply.. is that it?

my HDD is about 2 years old now.. maybe it is the problem.. i'm replacing my zone alarm with comodo as suggested..

[Tyger]

Also, do you defragment your system on a regular basis, once a month or so? If you move a lot of files on and off you will get many fragmented files, which makes the system have to hunt for the bits and pieces.