Windows Vista very slow every 5 days

[Jaosean]

So i bought a new computer from a friend he had it for about a year it has windows vista idk if this is something to do with the operating system or not but it works fine for five days and then all of the sudden i cant do anything then after letting it sit it starts to work a little bit but very slowly i have to do a complete factory restore to fix it

i have tried everything from virus to registry fix and disk check everything i know how to do nothing works

it has happened like five times since i bought the computer

only way to fix it to keep doing a factory restore

anyone know what is going on?

 

[Sharam]

Vista was and is like that, it takes a bit of time for it to set itself up with drive indexing and such, may be you are not letting it finish whatever it is doing, Since this is happening on regular intervals for the time you have the system running before a factory default, one would guess is either doing self maintenance (should do this when idle for certain amount of time) or Windows defender is doing a scan, since we don't know your system's spec we can't tell how such activities would affect you and the system.

Have you performed all the updates? It goes through series of updates, re-starts, more updates, more re-starts then SP1, yet more updates and then SP2. Vista when it's applying the Service Packs, takes its sweet time ... then when it asks you for a re-boot or does it by itself, goes through 3 steps and after re-start still goes through another 3 steps, my guess is you are catching it around this time which sounds about right.

 

[Jaosean]

I let it sit for two days doing nothing on it one time to see if that was the case and still nothing
its a pretty good system 3gbs ram nvidia 8800GT quad core 2.71 Ghz

its always once i get to the update that is 1 important and 4 optional it seems.

it just runs super slow like it took 5 hours to start up the other day and 20 minutes to shut down
it usually takes half a second to start up and shuts down almost immediatley

 

[gbhall]

I am not quite clear if your symptom resolves itself or not. Are you saying that you continually reset to factory condition, and after 5 days it suddenly stops working, or slows dramatically. The big question is - does the problem resolve itself after a while (like 2 days may be required)?. This is what Sharam is suggesting - that certain undesirable things start after a time which will (should) eventually complete.

You also seem to be saying certain updates cause this problem, so the first step might be, as an experiment, prevent those updates happening. You can do that by adjusting Windows Update so that it only tells you that updates are available. You can either not download those updates, or download them but not apply them.

At the cost of constant pop-ups trying to remind you, you could leave the PC unpatched and see if the slow-down still happens.

Here are some other suggestions. An OEM version fresh installed from a main supplier like Dell has an immense amount of so-called crud, that you very rarely want. That sort of thing, over time, can become so out-dated that when it starts to try to update itself, what you see can happen. Very usefully, there is a crap-remover which I have found useful here http://www.bestsoftware4download.com/s-ruiqvrgb-crap-remover-software.html

The other things possible are - prevent drive indexing (component services, services, index service - disable). You may have anti-virus active or Windows defender (as Sharam says), any of which will frequently schedule a 'full scan' at spaced intervals like 5 days. Again these schedule can be simply prevented from running. There are a huge number of things which the naive user is totally unaware schedule automatic checks for updates. Examples most common are Java, Adobe utilities, MS dot-net, quicktime etc etc. You simply have to educate yourself as to where all these utilities have their 'off' setting for automatic updates.

Your symptoms could have a mutlitude of other causes, such as hardware problems, which may account for why your friend sold you what sounds like a reasonably recent and powerful system !! In your case I would seek to download and extensively run every hardware tester I could find. Test the memory, hard drive, video, network. I would also look into checking if there is an updated bios you should install (not too easy, however, unless you have some good knowledge).

As a final resort, if you become convinced you have no hardware faults, and the issue is some incompatibility with Vista, then I would bite the bullet and scrap Vista. Install Win7 instead. Better yet, if the original Vista OEM system allowed a 'downgrade' to XP, then do that (zero cost, or the cost of shipping a DVD from the PC maker). After applying SP3 to XP, you have a system many, many people refuse to upgrade from because it is still so good, and will be maintained by MS until 2014 at least.

Sorry I cannot give you more info specific to Vista, as I personally dodged that bullet !

 

[Jaosean]

It slows super dramatically u usually run games like wow on 70 fps and now there unplayable at 1 fps
even if i dont download the update it happens.

well i will do all these suggestions and see if it works if not then windows xp here i come

 

[gbhall]

I record these statistics here, partly for yourself and partly for future reference

Poll Results: How often does the Windows patch process hose your systems?
Date: July 12th, 2010 published in TechRepublic
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/window-on-windows/?p=2755&tag=nl.e064
Author: Mark Kaelin

5% every month
8% about half the time
15% twice a year
40% very seldom
32% never
total respondants 841

and now you tell me your problem does not come from MS patches !! Please try to update this post if you do find the solution, as your problem seems rare, and a known solution could be valuable to others. Thank you

 

[Sharam]

On top of what gbhall said, it has been known that Vista Service Packs caused a lot of issues with some systems, the trick was to let Vista install updates in it's own way.

I would also suggest to manually search for updates and apply them, do this before going to bed or leaving for work, or have Vista Automatic Update download and install updates for you but only when you are going to work, school or bed then disable it, I've seen this issue even with XP and an update that made the system VERY slow but after it was good and done, no problems.

Since we don't know your exact make and model or in case of custom build, your components make and model, we cannot search for problems relating to your specific system, be it a simple BIOS update for ACPI or many other reasons that forced MS to release Win7 sooner than expected judging by the time in between OS releases.

 

[Jaosean]

i am trying all these suggestions at the moment hopefully they work and i have an hp