Slow Computer But PT Normal

[patlaw]

Lately, I've been running into a different issue. An XP computer passes PT benchmark satisfactorily, but the computer is still very slow. Everything appears to be normal with PT. When I import a similar baseline, the numbers are comparable. I did read David's thread about slow computers.

My guess is that Windows is hosed. Is PT very dependent on the integrity of the operating system? If it is not, is there a way or a utility that will point to the operating system as being the cause of the slowness?

[David (PassMark)]

What is slow?
e.g. booting up, starting applications, frame rates on games, rendering web pages?

What are the specs for the machine?

[patlaw]

What is slow?
e.g. booting up, starting applications, frame rates on games, rendering web pages?

I apologize for not providing that information initially. Starting applications is where the low speed is most noticeable. The machine is used for business applications (word processing, web surfing). There are no intense graphics demands.

What are the specs for the machine?

It is a Pentium 4 3GHz with 2GB RAM on onboard video (Intel D865GLC motherboard). While this machine is obviously old, I have a number of similar Pentium 4 machines and another almost identical one with the same motherboard and processor.

When I have encountered similarly slow machines in the past, the problem has been either bad capacitors on the motherboard, a bad hard drive with low data rate, an overheating processor caused by clogged heat sinks or bad thermal paste, or a borked installation of Windows. While I suspect the problem with this machine to be one of those, I'm curious to learn how to use Performance Test to better determine the actual cause.

Also, when I ran All Tests, I received the following Warning message:

You're CD Read speed is 0.90MB/s. This is extremely slow and there may have been a problem with the test. Please make sure that no other tasks are accessing the disk and that the disk is in good condition.

Would you like to repeat the test?

Running the test again yields the same result. The disk in the drive is a commercially pressed disk in excellent condition, but I will try another one when I get home. My question is, can an IDE DVD drive cause a computer to be slow even when a disk is not being read?

[David (PassMark)]

Certainly a slow (or failing) hard drive can make the whole machine feel very slow. Can you post the results from PerformanceTest, or just post the baseline number if you uploaded the results.

It might also be that you have installed so much stuff on the machine that it is now short on RAM and starting to swap out to the paging file.

For the CD test try a different disc. A disc with a small number of large files will give the best results. Or use one of our optical test discs.

[patlaw]

The problem was not the CPU or the DVD drive. As a test, I reinstalled XP on a new drive, and the computer is functioning normally. That confirms to my satisfaction that the problem is a borked installation of XP. The computer may have had malware on it in the past, so anything is possible.

David, unfortunately I don't remember the exact number, but I think it was in the 450 range. When I downloaded baselines for similar machines, they were comparable. Tonight or tomorrow, I'll run Performance Test on the new operating system install. It will be interesting to see if the numbers are dramatically improved. It's unlikely since the machine matched the downloaded profiles previously.