Machines running slow. Common occurrence – yes. Lots of reasons why but where do you start?
I suppose if you summarise the likely issues you’d end up with a list that at least contains –
but one that doesn’t normally make the list is the likelihood that something could be afoot on the machine itself. Something ghostly spooky ?
A recent investigation into a fairly standard XP pro PC running Office 2003 like a 386 running Vista showed nothing through the list above and CPU and memory utilisation were absolutely minimal. Yet the responsiveness of the OS and the apps was terrible.
A question to the user about the fact that the disk access light on the machine was on permanently raised a response that “Yes – that seemed to start when the slowdown began”. Reboots did nothing and finally the question – whats accessing the disk. Whilst the next stage would have been to look at the process input / output – I hit on the fact that the Sophos antivirus version on the machine was so far out of date (machine had been unused for a long period of time) that it appeared to be trying to update itself and was having difficulty – but that because it was not using CPU only disk access and IO – that it wasn’t even registering as a drain on resources as normally hogs would. Removal of the Sophos returned the machine to its normal state.
This reminded me that one several occasions in the last 18 months – cloning a disk and replacing the slow one in a machine has had similar restorative properties !!!
So when diagnosing slow machines
– think once – think twice – think Disk !!!