Solved Sudden, massive drop in RAM performance

[Mogget]

Hello all!

I've had a fairly powerful Toshiba laptop running Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit since christmas, but recently decided I'd like a little more power out of it. I followed a fairly routine number of minor adjustments to the appearance, startup programs, and background services, but found that when I was done, my hard drive was moving files at no faster than 5 megabytes per second, sometimes dropping below 1. I went through the changes I'd made, and not seeing anything that might have caused the problem, tried restoring the system to a previous point... unfortunately, there wasn't an available restore point far back enough, and when the deed was done, the problem remained.

I'm hoping this is something simple; something that I clicked and didn't intend to.

This is rendering a very powerful computer that I rely on in my day to day life nearly useless. Please respond quickly if you have any sense of what might be causing this.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

Do you have a list of the services you changed or turned off entirely???

 

[Dwarf]

Hi Mogget and welcome to Windows 7 Forums

Have a look at this Tutorial: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/2495-services-start-disable.html

With reference to the appropriate link to Black Viper, ensure that all services are set to their default settings. Note that you may need to reenable some before you can reenable others, and you may need to restart your system a number of times.

 

[Shootist]

I don't believe it has anything to do with services being turned off, set to Manual or Disabled.

I had a similar problem after I installed a certain piece of software. Some how this software put it's hooks into the file system and slowed down every operation, Read/Write, Copy/Move, Deleting and emptying the Recycle Bin.
Once this piece of software was removed everything when back to normal.

So what software you installed lately?

 

[Mogget]

Shootist, you're correct; late last night I went through and re-enabled everything I'd turned off, to no affect.

I've also traced the initial onset of this issue to a point last night where I was doing a lot of installs and moves. I'd recently purchased four games from Direct2Drive; Dark Horizon, IL-2 Sturmovik 1946, and the Blazing Angels bundle, containing both games. The day I made the purchase, I downloaded Dark Horizon and installed it with no impact on my system. I downloaded Blazing Angels 1 overnight and installed it in the morning; no negative impact on my system. The first problem came up that afternoon, where Blazing Angels suddenly decided not to work after running fine that morning. That same afternoon, I went over to a friend's place (he's got faster internet than myself) and downloaded Sturmovik; it installed fine and there was no impact, then Blazing Angels 2. I can't remember anything specific from when I got home; it was a frenzied mess of the attempted install of BA2, troubleshooting for both Blazing Angels games, redownloads, installation repairs... and it was some time during that mess that my computer stopped working properly.

I've also narrowed the problem down; it's modification of data that's slow, just like what happened in your case. Accessing data, such as loading a level in Crysis 2, is running at exemplary speed; faster than usual even, because of my optimizations. But as soon as I try to copy, move, or delete a file, the speed plummets and the waiting times become obscene.

I'll do some checking around; hopefully, I'll be able to narrow down which program is causing this mess.

Thanks for the suggestion, mate.

EDIT: I just uninstalled everything; both blazing angels games and IL2 Sturmovik, along with an uninstall utility I forgot to mention called Revo Uninstall. I also remembered that I installed Mercenaries 2 while I was at my friends' place; I'll back that up to an external, then remove it and see if there's any change.

 

[Mogget]

Problem solved!

As far as I can tell, it was the removal of the Revo Uninstaller that terminated the problem. I guess that teaches me to be more careful around freeware utilities that can modify your registry so directly :/