Solved Windows 7 sudden slow down

[m0rtician]

Edit: Solved, the HD required a firmware update. An error in the firmware caused a self-diagnosis malfunction causing extremely low throughput.

Hello Everybody,

I am having a problem with my Windows 7 64-bit that I cannot diagnose. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Problem: All of a sudden my machine begins to run extremely slow. This has happend three times now over the past 5-6 weeks. The problem seems to be with accessing the harddrives -- i.e. once a program is loaded it runs fine. Copying files is an extremely lengthy process. Looking at the resource monitor I believe that the throughput (bits/per sec) is the cause rather than latency. When this happens my machine also runs slow in safe mode.

I am clueless about the cause of the problem. Once it happend after I installed a videogame, another time after a reboot and the third time it happend during a meeting (while I was not using the machine).

I have been able to "fix" it by applying some mix of system restore and repairs. Because the machine is so slow restoring and repairing is an extremely lengthy process and often does not work. The first two times I had this problem running system restore a few times seemed to make things work again. ...

I have been unable to diagnose any problems with the harddrive (using the vendor diagnose utillity).

To avoid the problem I have done the following:
* I always shutdown the machine when I wont be using it for several hours (rather than using the sleep function)
* Disabled sleep mode and set high performance always
* Installed an anti virus program (norton)

My machine is a HP z600 (Xeon dual processor). I have had this machine for about 3 months. I

Any ideas to either the cause of the problem, a solution or a workaround? Anyone having similar difficulties?

Thanks,
Peter

 

[richc46]

Lets determine the cause, try clean boot and report back

How to troubleshoot a problem by performing a clean boot in Windows Vista or in Windows 7

Lets see if we can determine if it is caused by a program that loads at boot.

Did you make an antivirus scan/

Download and scan with malwarebytes.

 

[m0rtician]

I have tried the following:
1. Safe mode
2. Safe mode (console only)
3. MSCONFIG (not loading services and startup) -> Restart (both into normal and safe mode)
and it is still slow :S

 

[richc46]

MsConfig is the same idea as clean boot. Make the antiVirus scan and download and scan with malwarebytes.
http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php

 

[m0rtician]

I finally found the source of the problem:

The firmware of my harddrive had a bug. Once in awhile it would enter into a diagnostics mode for a number of hours and during that time the access would be extremely slow. Updating the firmware of the harddrive finally solved the problem.

I was lucky to spot an article on this on HP's homepage ...

 

[richc46]

Glad that it worked out. Good luck