PC has gone dead slow all of a sudden??

[Flash]

Hallo Folks

For some reason my normally speedy P42.6ghz rig has gone as slow as a dog. The full boot now normally takes 3 mins plus compared to the 20 seconds previously. And when its into windows it can take upto a good 10 mins for all service to start and all icons to appear in the system tray.

Ive tried doing a reinstall of the OS but it claimed (windows XP) that it would take 39 mins at 22.00pm last night and I was still there with 5 mins to go when I had to call it a day at 00.15am.

My only concern with this rig is that it has a Qtec PSU and that it reports the 12v as 9.32v but used to work fine.

Ill be changing over to a Enermax 431w later but do you think it could be anything else?

Spec:
P4 2.6ghz 800fsb
256MB Kingston PC3200
PC Chips P4 800mhz motherboard
Qtec 550w PSU
2x 20Gig SCSI HDDs
Geforce Ti4200 GFX
PCI Nic
PCI Adaptec 2940UW SCSI card

No FDD or CDROM

Any ideas folks?

[steve threlfall]

Sounds like you have a virus. There was one on my dads rig that changed the hardrive setup making it run at a much lower speed. AVG 7.0 got rid of it

[Flash]

damn as it was a test rig I didnt have AV software on it :\

will it affect a renewed OS install as well? and if running AV software and getting the virus will it return to normal speed?

[steve threlfall]

damn as it was a test rig I didnt have AV software on it :\

will it affect a renewed OS install as well? and if running AV software and getting the virus will it return to normal speed?

It'l just run slower with the hardrive at a lower speed

Wether av software will return the drive to normal spped or not- depedns on the virus but i doubt it somehow

Best thing to do is use av software to get rid of any virus's if there are any and then change the hardrive settings back to normal.

I dont know how to do this myslef though

Can anyone else help?

A formate may be the best option if you dont mind losing whats stored but i does sound like a virus

[Flash]

can you remember what virus it was? and was it dire slow, imagine if possible running windows xp on a p166 with 64mb of ram

[steve threlfall]

can you remember what virus it was? and was it dire slow, imagine if possible running windows xp on a p166 with 64mb of ram

Dont know the name sounds like a format would be the easiest option

[Stubzz]

Could the CPU be throttleing down due to overheating?

[Flash]

Could the CPU be throttleing down due to overheating?

CPU temps are 33'c it has a aero 4 lite on it
case temps are 30'c
PSU temps are 41'c

[LayZeh]

Do you have an OS Installed and you're using the windows based installation of XP, meaning it basically reinstalls over an existing copy, or did you actually boot from disk, format the partition and begin a reinstallation?

You most likely have a trojan called svhost.exe that i originally spelt svchost.exe but added (sp?) so that anyone familiar with the trojan would know i meant svhost.exe, anyway it will use 100% of the CPU at all times which is an indication you're infected and would definitely cause your PC to slowdown.

Example
http://securityresponse.symantec.com....socksbot.html

A Variation
http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/anal...2agobotln.html

Let's say you don't have any viruses then the software/hardware issue must of been triggered by something you've done so think carefully about anything you've changed and the exact time when it started running slowly and what you were doing at that time.


I updated this thread with more info after Blub2k commented

[Flash]

yup I reinstalled over an exsisting copy .. will do a format install later .. but I did nothing out of the ordinary it just went slow

[Blub2k]

If you have an internet connection then you can do online scanning and clean it all up here http://security.symantec.com/sscv6/d...d=ie&venid=sym

[Flash]

the thing is it takes 10 mins for the dhcp client to kick in so I dont get a ip from my router until that service starts

[Blub2k]

You most likely have a trojan called svchost.exe (sp?) which uses 100% of the CPU at all times.

Ouch! Stop! that hurts, svchost.exe is not a trojan it is an essential windows service which allows other services to piggyback on it, hence the host, DO NOT TOUCH. Trojans could however manifest themselves with what you describe, please check things out before giving info like this.

svchost.exe in google gives this http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;250320

In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king!!

[Ferral]

Has the bios on the board reset itself at all knocking out all the timings on the ram and lowering the speed of the CPU, if its has then you may need a new bios battery.

When the exact same thing happened to me a few years ago my primary hard drive was becoming knackered and not installing stuff correctly or really slowly. I went to work one night leaving Windows to install and when I got home the hard disk was completely dead.

[Flash]

yeah I thought about that because my main rig has a few SVCHOSTs running or is it SVHOST?

I think he maybe thinking of the DHOST.exe virus

[Flash]

Has the bios on the board reset itself at all knocking out all the timings on the ram and lowering the speed of the CPU, if its has then you may need a new bios battery.

When the exact same thing happened to me a few years ago my primary hard drive was becoming knackered and not installing stuff correctly or really slowly. I went to work one night leaving Windows to install and when I got home the hard disk was completely dead.

CPU still at 2.6ghz ram still at 200fsb

tis weird, just so you know the drives are 10k SCSIs so should be super fast