Win2k is now unusably slow - what happened?

[bandXtrb]

I was printing and all of the sudden I got the blue screen -- Page Fault error or something. I did a reboot and reentered the Windows environment to find the system unusably slow. I don't mean "not up to performance," I mean so slow that a click on the start menu takes effect 30 seconds later. A few of my startup applications could not load and returned error messages.

When I boot into Safe Mode, the problem dissapears. However, the logon process -- in either Normal or safe mode, and into either Administrator or my other account -- is still incredibly slow (~10 minutes).

I've backed up my data and can reformat, but I'd like to at least try to save my current Windows 2000 installation.

What I've done to try to troubleshoot:

[*]Full system virus scan
[*]removed NIC and modem PCI cards, disconnected scanner and printer.
[*]Disk check on harddisk
[*]Swapped out RAM sticks
[*]Checked system/cpu temperature
[*]Looked for system resource conflicts in Device Manager
[*]Removed all startup items from StartUp folder and from within the msconfig utility. I also set the startup mode to Diagnostic to limit the processes that load on startup.

Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[A-star]

The best thing to do I think is reinstall, and then when you finished installing your programs and drivers, just ghost the disk or partition so the next time you'll have to reinstall it won't take more then 10 minutes.

 

[Agamar]

Need to check and make sure it isn't overheating. That can cause erratic problems like you are describing.

 

[Mem]

Could be something simple to something serious anyway I would use a good registry cleaner and defrag first, then reinstall of OS if that does not fix the problem.

 

[c0rv1d43]

Did you check the print spooler? If corruption occurred in the spooler's directory / file structures then the system may be continuing to labor at trying to print some humongous EMF or RAW file. You would not necessarily see overt error messages cropping up because of this. Also, have you checked the Applications and System logs in Event Viewer for any possible pertinent error messages?

- Collin

 

[NogginBoink]

If your box is configured to write a memory dump, this is not entirely unexpected.

See, when the machine crashes, it copies the contents of RAM to the pagefile.

When it's rebooted, it copies that information out of the pagefile into the memory.dmp file. Depending on the amount of RAM in your machine, this can take ~10 minutes or so with wild disk thrashing. You'll also likely get a "low on virtual memory" error because the pagefile is full from the memory dump.

All of this should be self-correcting after savedump.exe copies the dump from the pagefile to the memory.dmp file.

 

[GrumpyMan]

<< Could be something simple to something serious anyway I would use a good registry cleaner and defrag first, then reinstall of OS if that does not fix the problem. >>



This is what I would try first with the exception of the reinstall. But of course if everything else fails then do that too. Have you tried reinstalling the printer drivers? Since it works OK in Safe mode, maybe it's a driver issue. Make sure the print job is still not in the print que. Sometimes they don't get deleted properly.

 

[bandXtrb]

Interesting ideas on the printer spooler, drivers and the memory dumps. I don't remember seeing the printer icon in the task bar, but did not investigate further because I restored my partiton this morning before reading the replies (thank goodness for Norton Ghost). However, I will keep this thread bookmarked in case this happens again in the future. Thanks!