Resolved PC Virtually Unusable First 20 to 30 Mins after start

Nope, we aint fixed it yet folks. Half an hour tonight with hard drive sounding very busy and PC extremely, and I mean extremely, slow.
Can someone please explain to a simpleton like me why the hard drive can be so busy yet CPU usage (according to Task Manager) is only running at 2% - 3%.
I have, by the way, downloaded and used Western Digital disc diagnosis and both my drives are reported as healthy and faultless - I'm not sure whether to be pleased or not.
Looks like I might have to live with it until something obvious pops up one day.
Am going to try switching to 'Offline' when I close down tonight then see if this makes any difference when I next start up. Will that tell me if it's something coming down the line that's slowing things up or just something local within the PC ?.

 

Just outta curiousity... how full is your harddrive? Click your Start> click on "My Computer "> r-click on "Local Disk "> click on "Properties "

 

How Full?

Have you been getting messages like "Low on memory "? If so, buy a 1Gig RAM Stick... easy to install along side of/or replace your current RAM stick.
Whatta dif!

Another thing I did when my 'puter started slowing down:
Now, here's one that even most of the geeks don't know about and you probably will never find out about from anybody else, and its a little tricky:

To make your RAM run faster and better, Open up your "Notepad" --- (not Notebook) and completely clear any text away; Next, type this
exactly: mystring=(80000000) That's the word mystring followed by the equal sign, then the number 8 with 7 zeros in parenthesis; there are
no spaces in what you type;
now click on your "File" button and then click on "Save as... ", then name it ram.vbs and save it to your desktop.

After you save it, you can drag & drop it onto your quick start button list. Then, whenever you start your computer just click on it to run the
ram.vbs --- you will notice the major difference.

 

Hard Drive is about 50% full and no messages 'Low On Memory'. Thanks for further suggestions and I will try starting in Safe Mode and the Mystring thingee and report back in due course.

 

VBS or VBE

After reading your tip, I did some Googling.
Every other 'hit' was telling us to use Ram.vbe not Ram.vbs
Which extension should we use ?
Thanks,
Rob

 

ram.vbs ---toldya it was a bit tricky!
I shared this tip with one of my sons a couple years ago; he did it .vbe... no workee! He changed it to .vbs like I told him; it works. Then he shared it with someone else, who then shared it with some others and it started getting around on the internet. I don't remember where I learned it from...

 

In answer to PeteC's question, if I start in Safe Mode the PC is like greased lightening right from the start and hard drive is heard to be vitually idle staight away. Not sure what this is telling us.
A question for RoyalT1. I have set up the Ram.vbs as per your instructions and it is sitting in the quick start bar. Do I need to click it as PC is starting up or can I click it (single or double click ??) any time after start ?. I ask because I don't get, and I presume it's normal, any dialogue or indication that the function is in use.

 

click what should appear on your Quickstart list as ram anytime after you are up and running... I usually click it before I open Firefox or IE

 

Thanks Royal1T and PeteC. I did as suggested and started up with a 'bootlog' last night and got three or four pages of text which included literally dozens of 'Did Not Load Drivers' but being very unsure of what I was seeing and thinking this might be an old log (rightly or wrongly) I deleted that and did another log this morning. I got a much smaller log, about a screenful, and the following were the only listed 'Did Not Loads' :-
Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\NDProxy.SYS
Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\lbrtfdc.SYS
Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\Sfloppy.SYS
Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\i2omgmt.SYS
Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\Changer.SYS
Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\Cdaudio.SYS
Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\PCIDump.SYS
Did not load driver \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\ipnat.sys

Should I be doing anything about these, if so, what ?.

Incidently, whilst playing around last night, I discovered four or five 'scheduled tasks'/update progs that were obvious that I didn't need so deleted them. Probably coincidence but PC booted up beautifully this morning but that doesn't necessarily mean that things are o.k., it has been doing this sometimes anyway.
Thanks for your patience and ongoing efforts.

 

This forum is a bit difficult to read (the way the posts are shown), so forgive me if you have tried these -
When the drive is making busy noise
- Show Task Manger, and sort the Processes by cpu
(You do that by clicking the cpu column heading slowly, twice)
See what is using your cpu
- Try the same with the Mem Usage column

- Have you run MSConfig to see what is starting up ?
Go to the Startup Tab, and browse all those with a Tick.
By looking in the other columns you can usually work out what is the related application.
You should be able to safely untick a lot of those.

- Have you turned off all the indexing, as suggested earlier ?
- Have you disabled (with a vengeance), Office Toolbars, Office startups, Office/Word indexing ?

Have you told us which antivirus you have running (sorry, too lazy to read all the posts) ?
When your busy noise is happening, have you tried disabling the antivirus, etc ?

 

Okay, thanks both. Will try to work through the latest comments from PeteC but I have to learn a little bit more about using this forum before I can post to the Malware Analysts, e.g creating links, posting logs etc.
In reply to robcrombie: I will try to analyse CPU usage as suggested.
I have used msconfig and have got bare minimum start ups.
I have turned off indexing
I don't have Office so nothing to turn off there, although I do have the Open Office Suite.
I have Avast anti-virus but disabling this makes no improvement,

 

Thanks for your vote of confidence PeteC, I'm sure I'll get there.
The real reason for this post however is to say that PC has been running fine all day until suddenly I heard the hard drive take off into it's 'very busy' mode and everything slowed to a crawl. Eventually managed to get Task Manager up and it showed around 70,000K of memory usage against Sychost.exe. Is this significant ?.
After about 10mins all settled down again.

 

I always have Task Manger running in the Sys Tray.
Anytime my PC is ignoring me, I cast an eye down there to see if the image is green (busy CPU).
I usually don't maximize it, to see what it is. I just wait patiently.
I don't mention me 'waiting patiently' in relation to your problem.
It just prevents me from smashing the keyboard because it appeared to be ignoring me.
I raise all that to demonstrate one use for having it running all the time.
I now have it running permanently.