Help Me Diagnose Poor Performance

meths

meths

meths

Soldato
Joined
12 Mar 2005
Posts
4,403
Hi all.

My work PC is shockingly slow to become responsive on boot up each day. The machine is running XP and first thing this morning for example I loaded up windows and launched outlook which took around 20 minutes with the computer not becoming responsive enough to use for another 30 minutes. This issue affects every PC in my office but no one reports the fault and it's generally accepted that that's just how things are.

I've repeatedly reported the problem to my IT department who have tried various things to fix it without much success (generally playing about with virtual memory settings) but I think the problem lies with the Sophos virus software.

From power up the hdd light is constantly on and this morning in the first half hour since powering on the PC there had been 40gb of I/O reads from Savservice.exe (Sophos) even though the program is not carrying out an active scan. Could this be causing the slow performance as the PC's seem to have less than 1gb of memory (897064K) and the peak commit charge for this morning was 1430892K? Is Sophos fighting with windows to use the HDD?

I can't fix the problem as I don't have admin rights but it would be helpful if I could identify the issue before contacting IT again as they don't seem to be able to do so.

Any advice would be appreciated even if it's just to tell me I'm way off the mark with this. :)
 
One of my colleagues mentioned a similar problem with a laptop running XP last week. In her case the laptop runs fine (even with AV running). The only drain is when Shutting Down or Starting Up.

I doubt your AV would have a major impact on boot times, but you can try disabling it, and see what difference it makes (if any).

Here are some useful links I came across when looking into it:

1. Try disabling Hibernation if it is not already.
2. Take a look at this link for some good instructions on things to try. The Prefetch section looks promising.
3. If the PC's are also slow when closing down take a look at this link too.
 
What's the spec of the PC ? 1gb ram (or less) even on xp is rather low. One of the biggest hits to performance I see on older PC's is the antivirus so if possible I would try and get that removed (at least for testing) and/or get some more ram fitted.

I would also get the hard disk and ram tested.

I have seen huge boot delays with systems using old network card drivers so try getting those up to date.
 
Thanks guys.

Jay, it's not the boot phase that's the issue really as it gets to the desktop in a reasonable amount of time. It's the time between seeing the desktop and being able to do anything with the pc.

Once the HDD light goes out it is fine so that says to me it's something is going on and is what made me look at the I/O stats in task manager. I think it's to do with the On-Access Scanning on Sophos as it might be virus checking every file it finds on remote drives.

I'm going to have a conversation with IT tomorrow and see if I can get them to check the AV settings but it's like banging your head against a wall as they don't want to acknowledge that there is an issue at all.
 
Oh I see, I probably missed the point as a result of skim reading through my dinner!

I would still reference the Prefetch section of the link I pasted in point 2 of my post. Between that and a build up of temp files etc. it can still cause performance issues for running programs. And it can't hurt to try :).

You could try switching to a more lightweight AV.. personally I use and recommend Microsoft Security Essentials and I also run Spybot S&D every now and again.

It could also be worth running a disk defrag, checking to make sure the HD is not near capacity and using a tool to check the registry for errors.
 
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