Suddenly running at a snail's pace

T

Tarrosion

Weaksauce
Joined
Oct 2, 2007
Messages
110
Good evening,

Earlier today I was using my computer without issue - browsing the internet, Trackmania United, Blender, etc. I left for several hours (the computer was on); when I came back the machine worked fine briefly but quickly slowed up.

To give more detail: after I returned, I was checking my email (using Firefox) with no issue. After about 15 minutes however, many internet pages started loading very slowly (not just the email) and eventually they started timing out. I double clicked a shortcut for iTunes, but the program didn't seem to open. However, a "spot" opened on the system tray, but no icon appeared there (just blue space). In task manager, iTunes was running as a process but didn't show as an open application.

At this point I tried restarting the computer and it froze. I was forced to cut power and restart. After restarting the machine, the state of things was no better. None of the programs I tried would open (Firefox, iTunes, AIM, msconfig (I think that's the name), etc. I was able to restart this time in the "correct" manner, although it took the machine a long time to shut down.

After this restart, Firefox opened without issue (perhaps a bit slower than normal, but nothing major) and websites are loading at a normal speed. However, other programs won't open (such as iTunes and AIM). Other system functions also don't work - I tried right clicking on My Computer and hitting properties - no window appeared.

I'm sorry that I can't give more specific details on the problem, but any help would be appreciated. I'm running Windows XP 32 bit.

Thank you for your help, and if there's any info I should provide please let me know.

Tarrosion
 
have u scanned your PC for malware? trojans, spyware, that kinda thing. if that doesn't work, i'd recommend to you to install windoze from scratch, that is reformat your HD and reinstall
 
So most everything seems to have "fixed" itself. Some programs still take longer to open than they should, but most work fine now. The only continuing problem is iTunes - even downloading and installing the most recent version doesn't seem to help. The process runs; the program does not.

I tried scanning with Ad-Aware, it froze a while in (and, if this is related, there were a hug number of running process modules. More than there usually are, I think).

I can't get the AVG scan to work - it always scans a certain number of items and then gets "caught" - after scanning this number of items, the scan goes on indefinitely without moving on. Stopping the scan and closing the scan have no effect; the process must be ended. I confess this isn't new - there's never been a problem before.

I also ran Spybot Search and Destroy.

Not sure if this is relevant, but there are often 6 instances of svchost running now. I don't remember that from before.

Thanks,
Tarrosion
 
The problem seems to be making itself worse again - everything but iTunes was working fine a few hours ago, and on the Apple support site it recommended deleting a specific file to attempt to fix a problem. After deleting this file in the iTunes application settings folder, now nothing will run again...

How can I backup data before reinstalling windows? It was about time anyways, so it's not such a big deal, but I've got a few hundred dollars of iTunes music, important school documents, Blender files...the list goes on, but I'm not sure of the proper way to save all this data - even explorer.exe can be finicky (writing this on a different machine).

If it matters, I have two hard drives. Is it possible to install windows to the drive it's not currently on while preserving the drive it is on so that I can salvage the data?

I know it's a bit of a 'newbie' question, but I need all the help I can get.

Thanks,
Tarrosion
 
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