Some Troubleshooting - Help Greatly Appreciated

D

DBesser

New Member
Hey all, new to this forum, and very sorry if this is the wrong place to be posting this.

Anyway, I come because I need some help figuring out what exactly is the problem with my desktop. I got it about two years ago as a Christmas gift and have since been upgrading and tweaking as needed. The thing ran beautifully until a few months ago, when something happened and everything began just running very slowly. At first I thought it was my power supply, so I replaced the 400W with a 600W. That didn't help, so I got a new video card. While that changed all the suggested settings on my games to max, it did not improve performance.

I'm afraid I don't know the exact names of some of the hardware I am using, but I can tell you I have an Asus motherboard with an AMD Athlon Dual Core processor that gives me about 2.6GHz (they came as part of a TigerDirect combo package along with my case; I don't know much else about them, sorry!). The things I purchased myself, and thus know a bit better include, 4GB of Corsair DDR2 RAM, an NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 video card, and a Corsair 600W power supply. If there's anything more I can clarify with these, I am glad to do so.

I'm truly not sure what the problem is here. After all the hardware installations, I figured it must be some kind of virus, but multiple scans with McAfee(garbage, I know), Microsoft Security Essentials, AVG, and Ad-Aware produced nothing (I did use each separately- I've heard that having them installed simultaneously can mess things up). I also cleaned my registry with CCleaner, which did not help either.

At this point, I'm thinking the only way to really get my computer back to its former self is a reformat, which I'm not keen on. If someone could provide clarity as to what the problem might be and how to fix it without wiping everything, I would be eternally grateful. Thank you so much for taking the time to read and help!
 
What Operating system are you using? And is everything loading slow (Windows and all) or is it just certain actions that make it slow?
 
Ah, my apologies for leaving that out. I'm running 64 bit Windows 7. It starts up quick as ever, but I find that browsing the internet slows it down immensely. After 3 tabs are open, it is mostly unusable. I use Chrome as my browser.

Edit: The internet, along with any other form of entertaining software, runs very slowly. Games like Global Agenda and Starcraft 2 I could understand, but when Minecraft started to run slowly as well, I figured something must be wrong.
 
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Im sure you have but have you tried deleting your temporary files, and deleting you cache? And how much page fileing are you using? Also Windows 7 Home Premium or Ultimate?
 
I have tried deleting temporary files and my cache, yes, but unfortunately that did not help. Presently, dxdiag tells me I am using 1775MB of my page file, with 6413MB available. I am using Home Premium.

Thank you so much for taking time to help by the way!
 
Are you using any 3rd pary add-ons to chrome? And try browsing to a few pages with your browser pinned to the left of the desktop and task manager -> Processes pinned to the right. Make task manager sort by the largest CPU usage. When you navigate to a page take a look to what process is using the most CPU. Let me know what you find :)

Also run some of the simple games and see if there is a jump in CPU in task manager as well
 
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Truth be told, I did not know it was possible to use 3rd party add-ons with Chrome! After opening a few pages (this one and a few soccer teams I follow) the top five processes are svchost.exe (98,980K), two iterations of Chrome (76,828K, and 61,456K), MsMpEng.exe (59,264K), and another iteration of Chrome (53,760K). Looking further down the list, I see even more iterations of Chrome and svchost, ranging between 30,000K and 6,000K.
 
hmm. MsMpEng.exe is usually from Windows Defender and can be conflicting with your antivirus. Try disableing windows defender, and see if that helps. With it enabled your antivirus is probably scanning windows defender and vice versa. All Symantec antivirus's usually recommend you disable windows defender with them anyways. Let me know if this helps, if not we will figure this out.
 
Hmm... After going to turn it off, I received a message saying it was already off. Could it be that it uses the same image name as Microsoft Security Essentials? That was the antivirus program I settled on after going through all of those up there. Maybe since Microsoft made it they figured they'd put in an algorithm that turns off Defender when running MSE?
 
I would assume that MSA would be just a bulked up Windows Defender, it probably does have the same name then. Have you tried turning off some of your start-up programs? Using MSCONFIG?
 
I have indeed done that. I forget the URL, but there's a site floating around where somebody compiled a list of over 100,000 programs that can appear on startup and said which are needed, which are not, and which are viruses. Looking through that, I found all the programs that would boot on startup on my own computer and turned off anything that wasn't essential/could be turned on manually if needed.
 
I haven't tried that yet- I know little of it and am thus frightened. :)

Is it possible to do a restore while keeping all my hardware drivers in tact, or does it act more like a time machine, restoring the exact software settings you had at the time the restore point was set?
 
It will revert all your drivers/software/registry back to the settings that they were at that time. But its very easy to get your drivers back with windows update, and most of it is automatic. It however does not touch any files, so if it changes something you do not like you can always re-do them with any files you have on your computer. This process is very simple and very effective, and it will probably fix your problem as well!
 
Ah, bummer, this did not work. I tried restoring it to about a month ago (as far back as it would let me) and unfortunately nothing was solved. I would love to just go all the way back to the point where I first installed Win7, but I guess that isn't possible. Oh well, it was a great suggestion, and thank you for the help!
 
Actually, that's the biggest reason I don't want to reformat. I got my copy of Win7 through a university, which only gave me a disk image and the key. Those got lost at some point, because I am a big idiot, and I will have to buy a new copy of Win7 before I reformat it. :(
 
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