Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Slow discs speeds - NOT hardware!??

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Slow discs speeds - NOT hardware!??

    My Laptop has recently started to run very slowly, as this seemed to happen over a very short period of time, if not instantly, I considered that this was probably due to a hardware issue. I purchased Passmark Performance Test 6.1 to help establish which piece of hardware was the probable cause. Having run PT is was fairly obvious that the problem was the hard drive as the disc read & write speeds were about 1.4 MBytes/Sec, on all partitions, even though I had just formatted & cleaned them.
    The Laptop is still under warranty so I thought that I would rule out any software issue before returning it for repair. Using Acronis True Image I restored C: to it’s near new state & was surprised to find that the disc read & write speeds were now circa 35 & 25 MB/S respectively.
    On restoring the computer back to the more recent state, things were again very slow. The computer had been running Prevx 2.0 as it’s sole AV programme, I have since updated this to Prevx Edge & also installed AVG free, none of which have highlighted any issues.
    As well as running slowly I have also noticed the following issues:
    I.E.7. frequently jams up & stops responding.
    Prevx Edge crashes occasionally with the Windows message “Prevx CSI has encountered a problem & needs to close……..”
    My bandwidth meter often, but not always, shows a constant download rate of about 40Kbps & upload rate of approx. 45 Kbps, even with no applications open – this seems to coincide with when the computer is running excessively slow & the Task Manager “System Idle Process” & “CPU” usage adding up to significantly more than 100%!
    Has my laptop been turned into a Zombie Computer by some malware that has not been detected or is there some other explanation?
    Thanks,
    Martin.

  • #2
    I should have mentioned that, even though my disc results were very poor, all of the other results were in line with benchmarks for similar specification machines. There was also no appreciable difference between the other results for my "up-to-date" vs "near new" software installations.

    Comment


    • #3
      35 & 25 MB/Sec is typical for a older laptop. Anything less than 10MB/sec is pretty awful.

      If it is fast when the PC is in a new clean state, and slow later on then the problem is more likely to be software related and not hardware.

      Can you take it back to a clean state and install one application at a time and see which application (or device driver, or O/S patch is causing the problem).

      Note that the anti-virus applications themselves can also cause a significant slow down. Especially with older PCs.

      You might be able to use the DOS netstat -ab comand to find out which applications is talking on the network all the time.

      Comment

      Working...
      X