Slow / Not Responding (Windows 7)

hi there

i was wondering if anyone could help me with a problem that i seem to be having with my computer.

the specs of my computer are:

AMD Phenom II Quad Core 3.4Ghz
4GB Ram (can supply details of the ram if needed)
Windows 7 64bit (Home version)
1TB Sata Hard Drive (Western Digital)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285

I have had this computer for about 2 years, built it myself and im pretty sure i have all the right parts etc, built it on christmas day of 2010 and for about 3-4 months the computer was awsome, working fine in everyway, then after this time of working fine the computer started to act oddly, programs would start to be unresponseive, basic folders wouldnt open and if they did they would always crash, the computer would slow down to a point that it looked like it wasnt doing anything, the mouse would work as normal but folders and programs would take for ever to open and when they did open they would just crash, trying to get onto task manager would also take a life time, the hard drive light / indicator was constantly on, not flickering or going on and off but just a constantly lit, which had never happend in the 4 months the computer was working. to resolve this problem i formated my computer and reinstalled windows 7, computer was working fine again till about a month later the problems came back, its been 2 years now since if have had this computer and i think i have atleast formated and reinstalled windows 7 about 20x and the problem keeps coming back, i have no idea whats going on :S

can anyone shed some light on this problem ?

if you require any other information just let me know and il try my best

sorry for bad spelling and grammar

 

Hello Warren and welcome to CHF.

My initial thoughts are with either your Harddrive, your RAM, or lastly, your motherboard.

My reasons for believing this is that it seems all is okay whilst the system is "fresh" and new, but over time with more and more things saved and loaded and installed, it slows down and you get these issues. It could be a few bad sectors of your harddrive that whenever these get reached, can cause this issue and plenty of reading errors when opening simple folders.

You can check your drive's heath with a built-in windows utility by doing the following:

Launch Windows Explorer, right click the drive that you wish to examine and choose Properties. Switch to the Tools tab and click the “Check Now” button under Error checking. Select “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors” to perform a thorough disk check.

Some people would recommend using the specialist tool created by the hard drive manufacturer to check the disk and this can be used also, but there is no harm in using the built-in one first as it is easier and quicker to start than to mess around with downloading one form the web.

This utility will scan and check for errors within your harddrive and attempt to fix them. But there is no substitute for regular backups and if the harddrive is failing, there is no magical tool that can fix a physical issue with the disk.

 

thanks for the reply, how can i tell if it is my ram or mother board with out buying new hardware and testing them ? is there away of testing these components while they are in my computer ?

 

Well the most obvious issue to me would be the harddrive, if all checks out there and it is fine, then we would look at the RAM. You can test this a few different ways. The most common method is to only install 1 RAM stick onto the motherboard and attempt to boot up the system, if all is fine then swap out that stick for another one and repeat until alls ticks are checked. You can also run a program called Memtest. But first I believe we should explore the possibility of your harddrive, as this seems most logical to be causing the issue.

another possibility could be the fact of your system being under pressure with too many programs running in the background and using up too much memory and CPU cycles to allow the other things to run smoothly. On average, what programs do you have installed before the system starts slowing down and has it started slowing down after installing the same program each time?

 

i dont really install anything really, just a few games and thats it i dont have any media players like itunes or VLC and i dont have any anti virus software, i just have the basic windows 7 64 bit and its updates, and my games, i dont run any other programs in the back ground that i know of

 

Well I would strongly suggest that you get yourself some antivirus protection, at the very least an on-demand anti-virus scanner that you can use weekly to check your system is clean. Any system that is connected to the internet or receives installs, should always have some form of protection as malware and viruses can indeed make your system run a lot slower and sometimes corrupt everything on it.

Did you follow my previous instructions on how to scan your hard drive for errors? If so, did anything get reported?

I think the next step will be to get your system secure and cleaned, depending on how long it was since your last re-install it might take the help of one of our Malware specialists. That way we can rule out a simple malware possibility and then move onto other hardware possibilities.

For a bit of reading, I would suggest you look through these posts:

Malware - A Brief Introduction: http://computerhelpforums.net/topic/13109-malware-a-brief-introduction/
Some Malware Avoidance Basics: http://computerhelpforums.net/topic/13112-some-malware-avoidance-basics/
Security Suit and Removal tools: http://computerhelpforums.net/topic/13971-antivirus-security-suite-removal-tools/