Computer gets really slow out of nowhere.

I have an old, crappy Vaio that I installed a free copy of Windows 7 Pro, 32 bit on. It has a 1.6GHz (single core) processor so it can't really handle a lot but does manage pretty well. However, lately I've noticed that out of nowhere it'll start using the Disk (using the taskbar meters and it'll peg the Disk I/O) to the point where I can't actually do anything. I've tried to just let it go, thinking maybe it's doing some necessary processing but when I come back hours later it's still unusable. I've been hard restarting it to get back to using it...

Any way, I once managed to get the task manager open and get into the resource monitor but all I could see was "System" doing all the read/write.

Is there anyway to figure out what's causing this? I know it's not AVG doing scans as I've disabled that. I'm pretty sure I've disabled all scheduled events (eg disk defrag)...so I don't know where to go from here.

Any help would be appreciated :)

richc46 said:

Bring up task manager and see whats running. Just click on the task bar to bring it up or ALt+CNTRL+Delete

Alternatively and maybe better go to search and type process explorer, for the information.

As I've stated, Task Manager is no help because it's not killing the processor and when (IF) I can bring up the resource monitor I see nothing more than "System"....

Are all the drivers installed and most importantly in your case, are your pata/sata drivers installed?

si8mon said:

This is the Process Explorer. Press Ctrl-Shift-Esc to open the task manager and then click on the 'processes' tab. Check the processes that are using a lot of memory.

You can also click on the memory column to sort it from most memory usage to least....that's what I do to keep my programs in check.

Bare Foot Kid said:

Hello awenthol.



As a precaution it may be useful to download and install the free version of MBAM, once installed run a full scan just to see if it reports any issues; be sure to post back to keep us informed.


Malwarebytes

Did a malware bytes as well as an AVG scan and neither came up with anything. I did, however, uninstall some RAM management software (yes, I know, 7 already does a good job but this laptop only has 500MB and I thought this would help) and it at this point appears to have been the culprit, however, I have not used the computer long enough to legitimately tell.

Anyway, I'll see what happens and try to get some use out of the hunk of crap over the next couple of days.