Win 7 Extremely slow after 6 days of not being used

For the past 4 or 5 months I almost never turned my PC off, only restarted the system from time to time if it seemed a bit clogged or slow.

Six days ago I went out of the house for the holiday so I had to turn off the computer (shut down). I did that by going to the main orb in win 7 and by selecting "shut down".

Today I returned from the holiday and when I turned on the PC, I noticed that it boots EXTREMELY slowly, especially after it asks for my admin password. Also all the programs work extremely slowly (not only the boot sequence). It looks as if there is some resident program that sucks all the resources but I don't see it in the task manager. The current CPU usage is about 5% and there is about 2 MB free physical RAM.

If I now start Chrome it will show up only after 5 minutes or so, or it may freeze the system completely. Even Notepad takes about 1 minute to show up after being selected. Several times I couldn't even bring up the task manager (I got the message "Windows can't initialize security tasks..." or something like that).

I just did a system restore to a date when I remember that my PC definitely worked well (about 10 days ago), but I am still having the same problems.

BTW. It also seems as if the program that controls the speed of the fans inside the PC is not working properly and right now I hear almost no noise from the fans. While I did a system restore from the Windows Safe mode the fans worked properly.


Could anyone suggest what I could do in order to repair my Win 7 installation? This is so weird.

The first thing I am going to suggest is Check for windows updates manually. ORb ( start button) whatever, all programs Windows updates. Do all updates reboot if needed and check again. that is to be sure any security leaks windows caught are fixed. ( pathced )
Then from there, look closer at installed programs, For example if you have Bit torrent installed, check program file foldesr for added on programs, this happens when people just install and do not do a Custom instalation. Other Tool bars or programs get installed. Third, check your browser tool bars. if you have alot of them they all communicate. I suspect it may be a communication program hogging power and bandwidth. OR a virus. but we arent there yet.



IF no updates. Check the programs installed as mentioned above. ( physically look in programs files and Programs ( both program directories in C: )

also unhide folder files checking Local folders and local low MS folders for installed hidden plugins programs.

hope this helps.

Just to report the solution after a lot of wasted time trying to find a software issue, it turned out that it was due to a faulty hard disk. I changed the hard disk and now everything works fine again.

fseal said:

Now that you mention it though, If your HD was spinning 24/7 (no spindle down or auto park), shutting them down till they completely cool off is also common to have them not want to come back on again. They freeze or seize up sometimes...

Sort of like the person who works like a dog for 40 years, then finally retires... and is dead within a week or two.