Windows Has Slowed To A Crawl - surely sp2 is not the cause

I am trying to figure what is wrong with this one copy of Windows that has slowed to crawl since I installed sp2. I certainly hope that sp2 is not the cause so I am searching for malicious software undetected by spybotS&D, avast, and AdAware. My troubles with ZoneAlarm has left my computer unprotected by any firewall at times and then the efforts to fix my DSL connections had me connecting directly to the modem rather than through the router as I usually do. So it is possible that something has gotten through. I am particularly suspicious of the services I cannot see that run hidden under the name of svchost.exe

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Of course without knowing what kind of computer your running I assume that it is pretty old 5+ years.

Here is what svchost.exe does



By the sounds of it, your problems are ram and memory in which I recommend this program

RAM DEF
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_down...s/download.html

This will help clean up your ram and memory usage.

Next I would look for a registry cleaner and defragger, sometimes if you clean out the errors and unused programs. It usually speeds up the computer a little bit.

Of course here is the usual schtick, delete any unused programs and of course your already running the virus/adware/spyware programs.

Of course Have you deleted any files that you shouldn't have?

 

 

 

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ZoneAlarm is problematic, I would remove it if you have not, unfortunately, I haven't looked at an alternative yet (due to running mostly in Linux).

Unfortunately, I've been trying everything to have someone contact me from ZA about the problems I've come across with using it, my strangest one being everytime a CD was inserted in the drive, ZA would want to update even though it was always uptodate, not only that, it hung the CD drive.

Another problem is ZA causes the computer to not shut down correctly, sometimes and that the End Task always appears for it.

I am now no longer recommending ZA, as I keep encountering more and more problems with it.

Anyways off ZA's case, SP2 does slow the computer down, it should not crawl, but that depends on the system and it's resources.

You can view the processes used by SVCHOST through Command Prompt. Start | Run type cmd.

Then type in the command prompt: tasklist /svc

That should tell you the processes that are running through SVCHOST.

SP2 does slow down the computer though, I rely on Spybot and Adaware quite a bit, and they do a good enough job for me.

Cheers,

MC

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This computer is about 4 years old and has 256MB memory. This problem caused me to buy a new computer with 2GB memory etc..., but instead of retiring the old computer, I will retire the oldest in my LAN of four computers. I bought a new hard drive and installed the OP (Windows XP home ed) on the new hard drive for this old computer, BUT I want to understand what went wrong in order to avoid this happening again on the new hard drive. In particular I want to reassure myself that sp2 will not destroy the usefulness of the computer before I install the thing again on the new hard drive.

I tend to remove nearly every startup entry so there is none that I feel is non-essential. That is why I am looking at the services as a possible cause of the problem. But do you think 256MB is insufficient to run sp2? Since I can always add more memory to the computer if that will help. As for removing something I shouldn't have, it is always possible, but that would be good news, since it is less likely to reoccur on the new hard drive.

The comments about ZA is appreciated and I had already just about given up on this program. The Windows firewall seems to be working fine, on the other computers and since they connect to the internet through a router maybe it sufficient.

Thanks for the help.

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@mitchellmckain: You should be able to restore back Windows the way it was before the Service Pack 2 update. I don't recall if Windows does this, but I'm sure it created a restore point (or at least have the uninstall entry for it somewhere) before it installed the update. If not, you can always create a manual restore point before doing the service pack update next time. If anything goes haywire, revert back using the restore point and see if the system is running normally again.

I'm sure we all experienced problems with a firewall program before. I have been using ZoneAlarm for many years already and don't have much to complain about it. It did lock me out once before since I denied access to the Generic Host Process. This was after a new Windows install (which I do yearly) and I must have accidentally hit Deny by mistake.

If this problem happened after the SP2 install, I wouldn't think it could be ZoneAlarm...

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