lag problems

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i was wondering if anybody has had this problem or knows what to do about this. i'll reinstall (completely format) windows XP, install my basic programs, and about 2 to 3 weeks later, the computer will start having really bad lag problems. this has happend 4 times already. i have mcaffee virus scan, blackice for my firewall, i have adaware and spybot. there is no need to defrag the HD. in the Taskmanager, there are no programs hogging the CPU or the ram. SP2 is installed, but even uninstalled, the lag is still there. there is no clear time when the lag starts, no program will really start it. i keep reformatting but its really getting annoying now. if someone could help that would be great. TIA
 
I would start running performance monitor and search through your log files to see what is going on when you notice the "lag" to start happening.
 
i'm having almost the exact problem that has been described.

it started all of a sudden last week... i think it may be memory related, but a memtest shows no errors...
 
I am having this issue latly too at first I thought I may have gotten hit with the WMF vulnerability that popped up, but that clearly isn't the case since I have formatted as of recently and patched. the problem seems to come up mostly when loading Firefox or Yahoo, and sometimes even google talk. the mouse pointer is sluggish and if winamp is open and playing the music skips like crazy until it clears up, if voice is open it totaly screws up the voice chat. I have thought or at least I think of everything from spyware checks, defrag isnt a problem, memory testing, hard drive testing, to cooling off the comptuer more. All to no avail. Any suggestions would be great. Running Windows XP Pro. SP2 all patched as of this post.
 
What PC specs do you people have?

On a 1.7Ghz Celeron using 256MB RAM one will experience lag when opening Firefox whilst running things like Anti-virus programs in the background.

Gtriamy you have a better, but still susceptible system to lag problems after installing various programs.
 
Do any of you have motherboard with the Nvidia Nforce2 chipset?
I had this same problem and found it to be that windows xp automatic updates updated the audio drivers the Cmedia drivers it has done it on me twice.
I have since turned off windows xp's automatic updates.
 
This lag has never been a problem before it's a recent thing as of a few months ago, I don't have Nvidia or Nforce either, if it helps anything it's...

1.80Ghz AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (thoroughbred)
ATI Radeon 9200
Sound Blaster audigy ( I think it was x-gamer or something can't recall for sure)
anything else that I have forgotten that might help ask :p

in a desperate attempt to try and figure out what was wrong last night I uninstalled just about every program I had installed and the lag never let up.
 
Try to disable memory hogs, run the bare minimum, that's a sysadmin's motto and I suppose it's not too bad in desktop case either. I'm not a fan of McAffee, have you tried AVG ? It's way smaller. When you run antivir/spy soft, do you find anything?

If you are not a gamer, you may change your performance settings so that programs in the background work better. Depending on your system usage, it might make things worse however...
Two more things:
- if you have norton ghost, you can create an image of your drive while it's still fresh and shiny and all... the reroll is maybe 10 minutes in comparison to whatever you need to install windoze and all soft.
- try switching (maybe dual boot at first) to linux! Ubuntu is a great newbbie distro, Mandriva and Suse are not bad either.
 
kaymastah said:
- try switching (maybe dual boot at first) to linux! Ubuntu is a great newbbie distro, Mandriva and Suse are not bad either.

At this rate I'm seriously considering it :haha:

it usualy is the bare min. with the exception of when I load thoes programs. Just the virus scanner firewall and AIM usualy
 
I have several browsers and find that Firefox(the default) has not lag while
IE always has a first-url-access lag that is troublesome. As I only use IE
for MS Updates, it doesn't bother me at all the IE is a bummer - - it always
fullfils my expectations :-(

Which browser are you using and have you tried any others?
 
On a slow machine like the 1.7Ghz I had Firefox lags heavily so I don't advise using Firefox on older machines, rather use Opera.
 
jobeard said:
I have several browsers and find that Firefox(the default) has not lag while
IE always has a first-url-access lag that is troublesome. As I only use IE
for MS Updates, it doesn't bother me at all the IE is a bummer - - it always
fullfils my expectations :-(

Which browser are you using and have you tried any others?

I use firefox mostly and IE for updates however the lag occurs even with IE, it's enough to drive one nuts.
It doesnt happen after a clean format but give it like a week or two and the lag appears, and everything will cause it from Winamp, Paint shop pro, firefox to IE, hell even peerguardian, but winamp seems to make the worst lag to the point when moving the mouse its not smooth at all it just kinda jumps across the screen.
 
winamp is laggy anyway, i used to use it all the time on my 450 mhz machine, then they came out with a new version that would lag horibly on that machine, so i switched to music match jukebox. i currently have a 3.2 ghz machine, but still dont use winamp anymore.
 
Winamp lost it since version 3 came out... yes it offered more features but it seems to me like the programmers didn't care about performance at all. Thank heavens for Amarok, who knows maybe it'll get ported to Winbloze at some point.
 
SCHUMIinSA said:
On a slow machine like the 1.7Ghz I had Firefox lags heavily so I don't advise using Firefox on older machines, rather use Opera.
humbug; I have an old Gateway 733 hz running Win/98se and
it runs great!

two explanations:
1) Win/98 is much 'lighter' in CPU usage than XP
2) Your ram is too low and your swaping everything.

ps: ram too low == anything less than 512mb and a swap file less than 1024
 
Well, the lack of replying to anything is becaue I managed to screw up something uninstalling software, trying to figure out what caused the problem. To the point the computer woulden't boot explorer at all not even in safe mode so... So far I am lag free and everything is reinstalled that I had installed before all I can do is hope it stays that way now! Thanks for everyones input and I hope I won't have to return here due to lag problems again :p
 
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