Dads PC running really slow - totally stumped

PapaLazaru

PapaLazaru

PapaLazaru

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My Dad has been complaing for a while that his PC is running slow. It is a 2 year old Dell running Vista with a pretty high spec, though I do not have then to hand as I am at work.

I took a look at it over the weekend as I expected it was a virus, as this would not be the first time it has happened. He uses Mcafee for his AV.

I ran Mcafee / AVG / Windows Defender / MBAM through it in safe mode and they picked up nothing so I am sure it is not a virus.

Defraggler reports that his hard drive is running good, though it was fragged really badly. The weird thing is that Defraggler is struggling to defrag it. It runs fine in safe mode and completes but the drive is still fragged really badly and if you analyze it again, it just reports the same amount of fragged files. This is after it takes around 8 hours to defrag. :eek:

I really don't know what to do? I assume my next port of call is to make sure all the drivers are up to date but I have no idea why the hard drive will not defrag as I am sure that this is a big cause of the issue.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. :)
 
Why mess about. Just wipe and reinstal - maybee even Windows 7?
You could check the HD with HDDD regenerator - which can do wonders for a 4xed HD?
Program features :
* Ability to detect physical bad sectors on a hard disk drive surface.
* Ability to repair physical bad sectors (magnetic errors) on a hard disk surface.
* The product ignores file system, scans disk at physical level. It can be used with FAT, NTFS or any other file system, and also with unformatted or unpartitioned disks.
* Starting process directly under Windows XP / Vista / 7.
* Bootable regenerating flash can be created from the program and used to automatically start regenerating process.
* Bootable regenerating CD allows starting regenerating process under DOS automatically.

http://www.abstradrome.com
 
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Win7 has been discussed, but I am still stumped as to why it won't defrag. Surely it can be more or less rectified by doing some diagnostic stuff?
 
Well noted, as that has also been discussed. I have also discussed moving from IE to Chrome. :D

My Dad is very difficult to persuade to do anything,unless he has seen it on the TV, hence he may be going back to Norton as the AV 2012 reviews are actually very good.
 
Remove McAfee +++++

Hate Norton,screwed up my last pc, being using Kaspersky for about four years now, never had an issue.

Clean install & change to W7, ideally 64 bit.
 
Remove McAfee.

NEVER install Norton, what a ******* it is. We moved to that Kaspersky Lab, real good and cheap, but AVG for 3 years, not a problem.
 
Well the Norton 2012 reviews are actually quite good.

If we are to persuade him otherwise (I would personally prefer him to get Webroot or BitDefender), is backing them up with hard facts. He is not a believer in getting things for free, as I have already talked about both Ad Aware and AVG free editions and he is not having any of it. :mad:
 
You can also get Kaspersky for free on some Barclays bank accounts as well.

I also have a similar issue with my hard drive for my bootcamp partition. I can defrag it with diskeeper but it never seems to defrag completely and always shows fragmented files. I never really did look for a solution as I am not having any actual issues with it.
 
Norton 2012 is a quality piece of software, contrary to popular belief here, has very low resource consumption and is well worth the ~£19.
First I would check the health status of your HDD using software like HDTune.

Then:
- Buy Windows 7 (full retail), clean install (backup & restore if required)
- Install Norton (or whichever you decide)
- Install CCleaner, run it regularly (~per month)
 
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exia said:
Norton 2012 is a quality peace of software, contrary to popular belief here, has very low resource consumption and is well worth the ~£19.
First I would check the health status of your HDD using software like HDTune.

Then:
- Buy Windows 7 (full retail), clean install (backup & restore if required)
- Install Norton (or whichever you decide)
- Install CCleaner, run it regularly (~per month)
Click to expand...

This is sound advice but one which I was hoping to avoid. I do think you are correct though. In addition to this I will demand he defrag his drive once a month as well. I have NEVER seen 500gb so fragmented.
 
There's a couple of things which can stop defragging from happening. Firstly, if there's less than 10% free space on the disk, defrag programs tend not to work very well because they don't have enough temporary space. Secondly, a lot of defraggers won't defrag file fragments which are larger than a certain size, often 64MB. This is because defragging such large fragments is of little practical speed benefit. That can be why some files just refuse to defrag.
 
Ignoring the Norton side discussions this is what I'd do:

1) Verify hard drive is healthy using the manufacturer diagnostic tools, if drive is good continue to 2.
2) Run chkdsk /r either from a recovery console or via the drive tools options page accessable by right clicking the drive and selecting properties.
3) Remove McAfee
4) Boot into safe mode with networking, install malwarebytes antimalware free edition, update the database and run a full scan.
5) Install CCleaner and run both the file cleaner and registry cleaner, make sure to back up registry entries.
6) If it's still running slow at this point run msconfig and disable all non-microsoft startup services and all startup items, reboot and re-enable them one at a time with reboots to track down what is causing the slowness, leave slow inducer disabled or uninstall it depending on what it is.
7) Install Microsoft Security Essentials.
 
Mattus said:
a lot of defraggers won't defrag file fragments which are larger than a certain size, often 64MB. This is because defragging such large fragments is of little practical speed benefit. That can be why some files just refuse to defrag.
Click to expand...

This might explain it for me, I only use bootcamp to play windows games on my macbook and nothing else, guess a lot of the files could be over that size, large textures etc
 
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