1333 Athlon reported as 664 and more

Hi,

I hope you can help. I have an AMD 1333 Athlon on a DFI motherboard with 256Mb RAM and 64Mb GeForce Ti200 that has been running Windows XP Pro quite happily for about a year. Suddenly, the OS seems to crawl, really badly, as if it was an old 486 running XP. Even the fade effects on the menus can take up to 5 or 6 seconds to complete. Tried everything, Blaster virus removal tool, Welchia, BigF, just in case it was some side effect. The PC is protected with a fully up to date AV prog (Norton) and Zone Alarm Pro.
My Computer also shows the clock speed to be 664 Mhz (strangely, exactly half of the true speed) but the performance is not even anywhere near that. After no success with the virus tools, I eventually reformatted the XP hard drive and reinstalled XP (I deleted the partition and reinstated NTFS just to make sure there was nothing left hanging about). This did not solve the problem, on reinstall, the system was exactly the same, and this was on a fresh clean XP install.

I know the hardware is OK because I have a dual boot system and Windows ME runs fine. This is embarrassing me, I'm the IT manger for a mail order company and have been building PCs for 7 or 8 years and this one has me foxed.

Any ideas?

DML

 

As Pete says, what does your screen show on startup about cpu speed?

I would go to the MOBO site and check for updated BIOS. I had that happen to me and it turned out to be a setting for cpu speed in the BIOS. I found BIOS upgrade flash on my MOBO site and have had no further problems.

 

hardware checks out

Hi,


Thanks for the prompt replies.

No the answer doesn't lie with the hardware, BIOS reports 1333, windows Me runs fine, I'll try the cpu id link tho'

BIOS update, maybe if the board was new, but it isn't it's been running xp pro for a year.

But, the system did detect the Welchia virus this morning and removed it, then XP ran fine and even reported the cpu at proper speed. This means that the removal tool did not work the first time round!

But, now its doing the same again, rebooted twice and its back from 1333 to 664! Norton Antivirus up to date and good firewall.

the thick plottens

 

cpu at 100%

Hi again,

I've been investigating further and I think a few other people are having a similar experience to myself with no answer.

On boot, my pc runs at a crawl. Not every time tho' but about 90% of the time, these are the symptoms:

1) Cpu load at 100%, then drops and varies wildly between about 6% and 50%, main culprit is System Idle process.

2) My Computer shows processor at 664Mhz, but PC performs like a 486! (really!)

3) ZoneAlarm Pro shows attempts to hack in every ten seconds to 2 minutes from many different sources.

Firstly, CPU id programs show processor running normally (1329.54Mhz).
Task Manager does not show any obvious programs hogging cpu time.
Clean Boot does not work
Turning off Cable Modem does not work
Full antivirus scan does not show anything (definitions updated 20/08/03 on Norton Anti Virus, most up to date)
ZoneAlarm Pro is bang up to date.
running CMD in RUN menu, then using tasklist /svc does not report any unusual processes.
All svchost.exe subroutines are legitimate

After a period of time between 1 hour and 4 hours, cpu reverts back to normal, performance restored back to normal, all system resources back to normal. No difference in background tasks when comparing tasklist during slowdown and after the performance has reverted back to normal.

This has happened both before and after a full reinstall of the OS.

System spec as follows.
Athlon 1333 Mhz, 256 Mb Ram, GeforceTI200 64Mb, DFI mother board (BIOS up to date).
Dual boot system Windows Me and XP Pro.

Help!

DML

 

why not?

Hi Pete,

I'll give it a go. But I do know the ECS board in question mentioned on the other thread. The K75SA varied wildly from being rock steady (with lower speed cpu's anyhow) to wildly erratic. That SIS chipset did get a bit jumpy on later revisions and the CMOS did always seem odd. Draining Lithium batteries and reverting to default settings at random, also not working properly on 133/133 FSB mem settings.

well, my DFI AK76SN is not perfect, it has run ok for a year (no problems but not the fastest AMD761 chipset) but here goes.