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[Argonnek]

Ridiculous meaning "it took me five minutes to get to this subforum from DF Fortress Discussion and ten more to get this message typed through all the lag." I know it's not a browser issue because I've tried closing Firefox, but to no avail. EVERYTHING moves slowly, and the "busy" light on the laptop is solid white instead of flickering. I've checked the task manager, but it claims that the CPU has only about 1-5% use, as if the thing that's slowing everything down isn't using any part of the processor. Memory isn't an issue either, since it hovers around 35% regardless of lag. So... Help?

Spoiler: Computer Info (click to show/hide)

Manufacturer: Dell
Processor: Intel Core i5-2410M Dual Core CPU @ 2.30GHz Each.
Memory: 6.00 GB
OS: Windows 7 64-Bit Service Pack 1

Let me know if you need more info.

[miauw62]

I recommend running a virusscan with malwarebytes.
If that turns up nothing, use superantispyware.

[Facekillz058]

Yeah, I would do some Virus/Spyware/Malware/etc. scans.
Sounds like your computer has the E-clap, honestly.

[Tellemurius]

so this is a laptop, one thing i would check is go to the system monitor through the task manager and check hard drive activity, report what you find.

[Argonnek]

I should have mentioned this earlier: This lag only goes on for a while after startup. After a while, it stops being laggy and functions normally.

Also, I did a scan with (the trial version of) Superantispyware and it killed a trojan that  I never opened and several tracking cookies.

Tellemurius: I'll be sure to do that next time I reboot.

[Jimmy]

I personally like to do a format of the disc and a clean install every few years. I keep a second external hard drive with backups of all my documents, music, movies and pictures so all I lose is the crapware that I've collected.

[Argonnek]

Alright, I checked the resource monitor after starting up and I saw:
The Highest Active Time for the Disk is much higher than normal (reaching 80-100%) while the CPU remains within the 1-10% range.
The graphs on the right of the disk tab are chaotic and often completely full - though keep in mind I have no idea how to read these things.

[MaximumZero]

How long's it been since you defragged your hard drive? How full is it?

[gimlet]

OK, here is how I find out some of the stuff running at startup.  As soon as you boot, log into windows as fast as you can, then fire up Task Manager immediately.  Go to the Processes tab and click on the CPU label - twice I think, to sort by CPU usage descending.  Now any process that's using CPU will be at the top of the list.  Watch Task Manager for a few minutes and see what's running - it's a little tricky 'cause a lot of services are starting, but you might be able to spot a real hog or something that you don't want running at startup.   I go through and google each thing I don't recognize and find out what it is. 

Some of the things are a judgment call - a lot of antivirus programs will do anything from a quick scan of the boot sector and registry up to the whole windows directory or even more - *that* can take a while and it grinds on the disk, but it protects you at least a little.  Or a lot of things stick themselves in there to check for updates.  Oh make sure you're not running 2 different resident anti-virus programs, that will CRUSH your performance.

The next step up from eyeballing what's running is to get lists of what's running at startup, HijackThis from Trend Micro is pretty good (but has some learning curve), I think SpyBot Search&Destroy had a fairly decent one, and SuperAntiSpyware too iirc.  Argh I just looked at mine, I see AVG (the antivirus I've been running) has been installing more and more stuff at startup - maybe time to switch again, each antivirus seems to go through sucky periods where it's more annoying than helpful

Since it looks like something's hitting the disk hard from the way you describe it, the next thing to do is to configure Task Manager to show disk usage stats and then sort on those.  Depending on which version of Windows you have, it will probably be something under "Options" or "View"  like "Select Columns" - Page Fault Delta, I/O Reads, I/O Writes can be interesting to look at, watch your startup sorting on each of those columns and see if something looks like it's doing a suspiciously large amount of work...

[Starver]

Usually it acts the inverse of what you describe (goes slow after a while, rather than gets faster), but laptops are also prone to fluff-inhalation into their narrow air-cooling ducts and fans, especially if used on trousered laps, tablecloths, bedspreads, sofa cushions.

However, my best guess is electronic gunk (or, worse, malware) slowing things down that a good old re-install-from-scratch  might help with, if you're up to it, but that's already been covered.

The rest of what I was typing is largely a re-hash of what's already been said, so edited back out again.

[Tellemurius]

Alright, I checked the resource monitor after starting up and I saw:
The Highest Active Time for the Disk is much higher than normal (reaching 80-100%) while the CPU remains within the 1-10% range.
The graphs on the right of the disk tab are chaotic and often completely full - though keep in mind I have no idea how to read these things.

thats fine, go to the disk activity and check the processes for total bytes being used. Processes don't need to eat the cpu when transferring data and im suspecting two things doing this
a: a malware
b: windows system restore snapshot
just give me the process name and ill check it out

[foil]

You could download Process Explorer from Microsoft.  Its basically a more avanced Task Manager and lets you see better whats using system time.

Also, if you run "msconfig"  How many things are in the startup tab?  Anything in there thats not needed to run all the time from startup?

[Mongol13524]

Install and use this, it's free and actually pretty great:

http://www.iobit.com/advancedsystemcareper.html

[Argonnek]

Alright, I checked the resource monitor after starting up and I saw:
The Highest Active Time for the Disk is much higher than normal (reaching 80-100%) while the CPU remains within the 1-10% range.
The graphs on the right of the disk tab are chaotic and often completely full - though keep in mind I have no idea how to read these things.

thats fine, go to the disk activity and check the processes for total bytes being used. Processes don't need to eat the cpu when transferring data and im suspecting two things doing this
a: a malware
b: windows system restore snapshot
just give me the process name and ill check it out

Alright, the biggest disk hog is SASCore.exe, and it was using up to 15 million B/sec for a moment there, but it was all read and no write. Another one appears to be C:\pagefile.sys, which is all write and no read.

How long's it been since you defragged your hard drive? How full is it?

After my last post, I checked the defragger and had it analyze the disk. 0% fragmentation. I also have over 150 GB of empty space available.

Edit: After running the scan with SuperAntiSpyware, I notice that my computer is starting up a bit faster. Maybe it knows I'm on to it...

[foil]

SAScore is superantispyware.

Maybe best to disable it from startup as you only really need it when running a scan.


Unless its your only Antivirus, otherwise 2x things are doing same thing at same time, sas and another installed antivirus.