Windows 2000 Pro *very* slow

admin note: this looks to be more hardware than OS so moving the thread to the hardware section. Newt

Ok, here's a weird one: my wife's computer is very slow. We can't explain it, and nothing we do seems to fix it. Thanks in advance for your patience and help.

She has a Dell Pentium III 500 MHz with 256Mb RAM, running Windows 2000 Pro. After working fine for years, it is suddenly now taking at least 30-45 seconds to respond to almost any mouse-click or keystroke, and to do things during boot-up that should only take a couple seconds.

Here's an example: in Windows Explorer, the window opens pretty quickly, but for like 30 seconds the only part of the tree shown is the C: partition (where the operating system is). The cursor is not an hourglass, but *something* is obviously still "thinking ". It takes another 20-30 seconds or so for the other partitions on the primary drive to show up, and then even longer after that for the 2nd hard drive partitions to appear.

We get a similar response with every program we run.

This really has us scratching our heads. The processor percentage is negligible (like 2%). There are no rogue processes hogging resources. The hard drive is not flailing away. We shut off the firewall (NIS 2005). We've done scans with Norton Antivirus, Ad-Aware, Spybot, etc., and don't see evidence of any malware. I checked the Event Log under My Computer --> Manage and saw nothing significant. I even booted into Safe Mode and that did *not* make the problem go away. This would seem to rule out a driver problem, resource conflict or attempt to access the internet. And it's not like it hangs forever; things get done correctly, just very slowly.

Besides, the problem doesn't appear to be specific to a particular hard drive, partition or OS installation. We have a second installation of Windows 2000 on another partition, and it acquired the same problem at the same time.

The primary hard disk partition was re-formatted and the operating system re-installed. Later, we also recovered to a couple of earlier partition backups (which did not have this problem when the backup was made). I refreshed the ESCD (extended system configuration data). None of these measures helped.

I am leaning toward some kind of hardware failure since it doesn't appear to be software-related, but I am at a loss how to pinpoint it. (Is it possible for malware to infect something other than the hard drive?)

I did find a Microsoft RAM tester, and it claims RAM is ok. The machine does act as if it is very short on RAM, but what I see in Task Manager doesn't seem to support that.

I should back up and mention a couple of prior weird events that are probably related; I just have no idea how:

She recently installed a whole suite of Roxio / Adaptec CD burning software, and started using a Plextor external CD/DVD burner. Shortly thereafter, we replaced the internal CD burner.

The first big sign of trouble was not too long after that, when she saw a BSOD when trying to boot into Windows, some kind of very serious "hard" STOP error. I was not there to write it down the exact message.

The next day, it would not start Windows at all. I booted to DOS from a floppy, and when I tried to do a "dir" in the C: partition, it said the FAT was bad. Somehow out of the blue, that primary partition got destroyed.

At the time I figured the hard drive just failed, even though it is relatively new. But then it got even weirder: she has been alternating between two primary hard drives, an old one and one "under construction ". A day or two later, the exact same symptom (a fried C: partition) appeared on the other drive (!!!).

Is this a coincidence? I can't imagine what would destroy the FAT on both those drives at almost the same time.

This is what forced us to re-format and re-install Windows. The other partitions on both those hard drives are readable and appear to be fine. And after the reformat and re-install, the primary partition is fine (at least so far), and Windows works fine .... eventually.

Last night, we went back to the way things used to be, as much as we know how: we put the old CD burner back in and recovered the primary os partition to a backup made before Roxio was installed. Still slower than molasses in January.

Please tell me any ideas or theories you may have, or anything you think we can try; it may save our marriage!

Thanks so much,
Ted
Email address removed by moderator - security - yours

 

Are you getting any strange error messages or blue screens? Do apps randomly crash, or does the system lockup or reboot?

If you have a multi meter check the voltages from a molex connector you should be getting 5 and 12 volts (with in about a +/-4%)
If the voltages are acceptable then check the motherboard caps for yellow or brown fluid leaking out the top or around the bottom. If there isn't any fluid leaking then check to see if they are buldged.
If the caps look fine then I would test the RAM, also check the temp of the CPU. If the CPU is too hot it could be causing some issues.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Download the ISO and burn it. It has some great utilities that might help you determine the problem.

 

Thanks very much for responding ....

No, no, no and no. That is what is so frustrating, no messages to point us in the right direction.

Yes, we do have a meter and know how to use it. Are molex connectors those the little white plastic gizmos that supply power to the hard drives and CD drives with a yellow wire on the right?

Not sure exactly what caps are, but I can look for leaks or bulges.

I did get a RAM-testing utility from Microsoft and it seemed to think RAM was ok. I was disappointed, shortage of RAM is about the only thing that makes sense as a cause. I didn't check the temp.

I actually do have this at hime, and have used it. It's pretty cool. I'll dig it out.

Thanks,
Ted

 

Actually, the jury's still out on whether this is a hardware problem. It seems unlikely at this point, hardware all seems to be fine. It's still probably Windoze acting up.

Where is the "hardware section" you mentioned? I don't see it.

 

lol, I saw that right after I posted .. sorry.

 

Molex connectors are the little white gizmos that plug into a harddrive/cd drive.
Caps = capacitors they look like little metal cans.

Remember that the voltage coming out of a molex connector is DC.

 

Hi,
If you are swapping HDDs in and out, you need to check that they are being recognized by the BIOS correctly. Go into the BIOS settings and see if there is a a there is a menu "Identify Harddisk Drives ", run that each time you swap drives (don't forget to "Save and Exit ").

Windows may be changing the FAT to read from an incorrectly identified drive. When you are sure the BIOS has the drive installed correctly, run Scandisk (not sure about Win 2K, Win XP calls it Checkdisk). Set it to make changes automatically). If you have trouble you can run it in Safe Mode.

If it is saying there is a FAT problem, then the File Allocation Table will be reading differently from what is actually on the drive.

Check the drive/s with the drive manufacturer's utilities.

Matt

 

Thanks very much for responding. I don't think this is an issue. The two HDDs we've been using are the same model (Western Digital WD800) with the same geometry. Besides, we've been swapping back and forth for maybe a couple months with no problem.

Update: Since a second Windows installation on another partition had the same problem (meaning the problem was not specific to a particular partition or Windows installation), I assumed the problem was not hard-drive-specific. So I figured it would be a waste of time to repeat the "primary partition reformat and Windows install" process on the other drive.

This assumption turned out to be wrong. I did this to the other drive and it works fine. So now my wife has a working computer, but I am totally mystified.

It's easy to say hardware failure, but that doesn't explain the problem with the second drive.

I have no idea what caused two separate drives to lose their primary partitions at almost the same time, or what caused one of them to suddenly start working very slowly (but not the other one). <shrug>

When I get time I will probably completely zero out the bad drive and rebuild it, and see if it the problem goes away. But that will probably raise more questions than it answers. And I have found that unanswered questions, despite a workaround, invariably come back to bite us in the behind later.

Thanks.