RE: Slow computer -all of a sudden
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Computer is a home brew...AMD 2.something gig processor. 1meg RAM on an ASRock motherboard. Was running great, as of 2 nights ago, processes slow way down. A virus scan what used to take minutes now takes hours. Memory chip gone bad? I have 2 512's in it. Haven't even taken the cover off yet. Will be doing that this evening. Gonna remove and reset processor and memory chips to start with. Any other ideas on what to check?I did recently upgrade to IE 7.0. Bud Pytko'97 LSC Silver Frost'05 F250 SD CC PSD 4 X 4 AZ Beige'94 Prowler 5th Wheel
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There isn't usually a partial failure of memory or CPUs. They either work fast, or not at all. It can happen though.
Do the following:
1. Purchase and install a hardware firewall if you don't have one already. Most routers come with them now. Software firewalls are easily infiltrated, including the Windows firewall.
2. Purchase a system utility suite. Norton is very popular, but I've heard the scariest horror stories about them. I'd get a suite other than Norton. Or you can go the free route and download a registry cleaning utility.
www.majorgeeks.com is a great site for this kind of thing. You'll have your choice of at least five free registry cleaners. I use RegCleaner.
3. Run Windows Update over and over until all updates have been installed. Be sure to run their custom update as well. Then run Microsoft update if you haven't already done so.
4. Update your drivers (if needed) in the following order:
Network adapter (if off-motherboard)
BIOS
Motherboard
Video card (if off-motherboard)
Sound card (if off-motherboard)
Monitor (yup, this too)
5. Update directx.
If you've still got problems, there is one more trick to try. Go into your BIOS menu and disable anything you don't use. I've turned off my serial ports, parallel port, on-board network device (I've got a wireless card), and on-board sound (I've got a separate sound card). This reduces IRQ sharing, which can slow down a system quite a bit.
There is one last thing unique to your system. Asus motherboards (ASRock is an ASUS brand) use built-in IRQ sharing on their PCI bus. What this means is that two PCI slots could share an IRQ - and this is not alterable in Windows or the BIOS. My wife has an ASRock card and I do believe that some of the PCI slots are shared. I found this out on an old system I had with an ASUS board. I had a video card in a slot that shared an IRQ with the same slot my sound card was in. Gaming performance sucked. Some techie told me to move the sound car to another slot. Problem solved. Your ASRock motherboard manual has a table showing which slots share an IRQ. Check your setup against that.
If you've still got problems after all that, I'm out of ideas.