PC slowing down or GFX Card???

Wavey

Hello all,

In the last few days/weeks i've noticed my machine seems to be slowing down.
ie. when i move a window around the screen it leaves a trail like a naf 70's music video!
Also windows are slow to open up when i click maximise.

This happens when there is very few applications running. I havent installed any new stuff in ages. The only thing that happened was that the machine took a bit of a knock at xmas but there was no damage done.
It also seems to lock up much easier now when I try and work it too hard although the cpu and system temps look normal.

Is this a GFX card problem or is fresh install of Windows required? ( the last one was about 7-8 months ago)

I have two hd's with progs installed on both, so if a fresh windows install is needed should i format both hd's or just the windows one?

Any help or advice is appreciated.
Cheers
Wavey

P4 2.0
XP
1gig ram
30 gb hd
80 bg hd
Creative ti 4200 64mb gfx

BadCharlie

I have the same video card and 1gig of ram also, Im not getting any slow down. U should not be getting slow down in windows me thinks. If i was u i would do a reinstall and then make a ghost/backup of my hard drive.

There might be an easyer anser to your problem someone might be able to help.

Col_Loki

Would definetly think its nothing to do with your graphics card and you have plenty of ram so that isint a problem..... cpu should also be good.

A clean install should sort you out i think, you probably have a load of programs loaded over the last 8 months (mabye you cant see most of them) but thats probably whats lagging up your pc. All those crappy adware things etc....

Try to keep an eye on the task manager and see whats taking up most of your CPU cycles might give you an indication. Run an anti Virus aswell mabye?

Wavey

Thanks fro the replys lads.
Yep im running norton anti-virus and zone alarm.

So should i just format the winows drive or both?

Thanks again

Mutant_Fruit

Basically, what i advise is having your harddrive in 2 or more partitions, with one partition a dedicated "windows" partition, which you ONLY put windows onto, nothing else gets installed to that partition. For windows XP i'd recommend that the windows partition be about 3.5 gigs (maybe up to 4.5 gigs to be perfectly safe). Mines about 3.8 gigs with 500mb free. You'd be surprised at how much space all the critical updates etc take up, and the amount of stuff that has to be installed onto the windows drive (e.g. microsoft office has to insatll a lot of stuff into the windows drive, hogging up 100's of megs of space.

If you have a setup similar to that, then just blank the windows drive and resinstall. If you don;t have a setup like that, then backup as much as you can, and then format and repartition the whole drive.

Wavey

Mutant,

Its actually 2 separate hd's as opposed to partitions. But that does sound like a good idea.
Any suggestions as to a good program for setting up two partitions on one hd?

Also is there any way to keep all the windows updates to save me from having to download them all again after i reinstall?

Thanks for the help

Mutant_Fruit

If you have 2 seperate HD's all the better. Just choose one, and make a seperate partition on it about 3.5 gigs, and in future you will only have to blank that partition when you have to reinstall windows.

Since you havn;t got this set up before, i'll give you some quick tips. Firstly, move everything important off the drive which will now have your windows partition. This drive will be completely blanked.

When thats done, boot into dos, and run fdisk, it should be on the windows disc. I presume this is still possible under WinXP, if not, just grab a bootdisk off the internet and boot off it.

Whatever partitions are listed in fdisk for the drive you have chosen for your windows drive, delete em all. I think if there are several, you have to delete them in a certain order, so if it won;'t let you delete one, just try a different one, until there are no partitions left.

When thats done, go to the create new partition option, and type in 3500mb for the first partition (this will result in a partiton slighty under 3500mb, but that doesn't matter much). Then when that's created, just make a second partition with all the remaining space. Then install away.

Alternatively you could use Partition Magic, but i think you have to buy that before you can use it... But i'll leave that up to you...

Sir Random

It also seems to lock up much easier now when I try and work it too hard although the cpu and system temps look normal.

Make sure the "knock" didn't dislodge the Northbridge fan/hs and check the gfx card fan is still spinning too.

Wavey

Thanks for the reply Sir Random,
No, all heatsinks and fans are still ok

Think its just a build up of crap from installing and reinstalling. (Excuse the highly technical phrasing!!!

Impurity

you should also check to make sure one of the RAM cards didn't get knocked out either, just do a directX diagnostic (start->run->dxdiag) rather than lift the case off, it will tell you how much RAM is currently installed, so if it's less than 1 gig, ya know what the problem is.

My main advice would be to check the registry (click start->run->regedit->current user & local machine->software->microsoft->windows->current version->run/runonce) if you know how to do that and see if there is anything loading up at startup that is just taking up memory, although 1 gig should be enough even with that, unless it's taking up CPU time.

press ctrl+alt+del-> task manager-> processes and see if there is anything taking up CPU time/RAM then uninstall it if not needed.

You can also get a handy little program called "MaxMem" at www.analogx.com that flushes your memory every time it gets too clogged, could help in your situation.

Hope this helps, you shouldn't need to do a complete re-install, that should be your final option!