Ok, here's a weird one: my wife's computer is very slow. We can't explain it, and nothing we do seems to fix it. Thanks in advance for your patience and help.

She has a Dell Pentium III 500 MHz with 256Mb RAM, running Windows 2000 Pro. After working fine for years, it is suddenly now taking at least 30-45 seconds to respond to almost any mouse-click or keystroke, and to do things during boot-up that should only take a couple seconds.

Here's an example: in Windows Explorer, the window opens pretty quickly, but for like 30 seconds the only part of the tree shown is the C: partition (where the operating system is). The cursor is not an hourglass, but *something* is obviously still "thinking". It takes another 20-30 seconds or so for the other partitions on the primary drive to show up, and then even longer after that for the 2nd hard drive partitions to appear.

We get a similar response with every program we run.

This really has us scratching our heads. The processor percentage is negligible (like 2%). There are no rogue processes hogging resources. The hard drive is not flailing away. We shut off the firewall (NIS 2005). We've done scans with Norton Antivirus, Ad-Aware, Spybot, etc., and don't see evidence of any malware. I checked the Event Log under My Computer --> Manage and saw nothing significant. I even booted into Safe Mode and that did *not* make the problem go away. This would seem to rule out a driver problem, resource conflict or attempt to access the internet. And it's not like it hangs forever; things get done correctly, just very slowly.

Besides, the problem doesn't appear to be specific to a particular hard drive, partition or OS installation. We have a second installation of Windows 2000 on another partition, and it acquired the same problem at the same time.

The primary hard disk partition was re-formatted and the operating system re-installed. Later, we also recovered to a couple of earlier partition backups (which did not have this problem when the backup was made). I refreshed the ESCD (extended system configuration data). None of these measures helped.

I am leaning toward some kind of hardware failure since it doesn't appear to be software-related, but I am at a loss how to pinpoint it. (Is it possible for malware to infect something other than the hard drive?)

I did find a Microsoft RAM tester, and it claims RAM is ok. The machine does act as if it is very short on RAM, but what I see in Task Manager doesn't seem to support that.

I should back up and mention a couple of prior weird events that are probably related; I just have no idea how:

She recently installed a whole suite of Roxio / Adaptec CD burning software, and started using a Plextor external CD/DVD burner. Shortly thereafter, we replaced the internal CD burner.

The first big sign of trouble was not too long after that, when she saw a BSOD when trying to boot into Windows, some kind of very serious "hard" STOP error. I was not there to write it down the exact message.

The next day, it would not start Windows at all. I booted to DOS from a floppy, and when I tried to do a "dir" in the C: partition, it said the FAT was bad. Somehow out of the blue, that primary partition got destroyed.

At the time I figured the hard drive just failed, even though it is relatively new. But then it got even weirder: she has been alternating between two primary hard drives, an old one and one "under construction". A day or two later, the exact same symptom (a fried C: partition) appeared on the other drive (!!!).

Is this a coincidence? I can't imagine what would destroy the FAT on both those drives at almost the same time.

This is what forced us to re-format and re-install Windows. The other partitions on both those hard drives are readable and appear to be fine. And after the reformat and re-install, the primary partition is fine (at least so far), and Windows works fine .... eventually.

Last night, we went back to the way things used to be, as much as we know how: we put the old CD burner back in and recovered the primary os partition to a backup made before Roxio was installed. Still slower than molasses in January.

Please tell me any ideas or theories you may have, or anything you think we can try; it may save our marriage!

Thanks so much,
Ted
taketwo@columbus.rr.com

Like any code BIOS isnt necessarily stable, changes in hardware environments, errors loading BIOS and those little gremlins that crawl around the machine while we are asleep, among other things, can cause odd results.

You may want to try updating the Flash BIOS. It should be available from the MB makers website.

Update: Since a second Windows installation on another partition had the same problem (meaning the problem was not specific to a particular partition or Windows installation), I assumed the problem was not hard-drive-specific. So I figured it would be a waste of time to repeat the "primary partition reformat and Windows install" process on the other drive.

This assumption turned out to be wrong. I did this to the other drive and it works fine. So now my wife has a working computer, but I am totally mystified.

It's easy to say hardware failure, but that doesn't explain the problem with the second drive.

I have no idea what caused two separate drives to lose their primary partitions at almost the same time, or what caused one of them to suddenly start working very slowly (but not the other one). <shrug>

When I get time I will probably completely zero out the bad drive and rebuild it, and see if it the problem goes away. But that will probably raise more questions than it answers. And I have found that unanswered questions, despite a workaround, invariably come back to bite us in the behind later.

Thanks.

Thanks very much, that was on my list. But what could have changed related to the BIOS that would have suddenly caused the thing to slow way down?

Thanks,
Ted

hi I guess you have done basic troubleshooting steps like clearing startup
list, cleaning disk of the temp files, and also defragging in the safe mode. Since you say the programs are all responding slowly you could give all these maintenance tasks a try if u already havent for some performance improvement.
Do you see any hardware conflicts in Device Manager ? If any try to
resolve it by installing the right drivers or by removing the conflicting hardware.

I would suggest, try reinstalling the IDE controllers from the device manager.
Give it a try, also try creating a new user and login with the new user and see how the system behaves.

ALso since its a P3 500 MHZ it cud be a little slow naturally.

Thanks so much for responding. Yes, we've done all that, virus scans, spybot, ad-aware, disk cleanup, temp files, etc. The weird thing is, it has this problem even on a brand-new installation of Windows on a freshly-formatted disk, where things like disk fragmentation and temp files can't even be a factor.

No, there are none.

Hmm, ok, never tried that.

Never tried that either. I can't imagine the result would be any different, but anything is worth a shot.

To see whether it's hardware or not, it seems logical to run a different os. It's been suggested to try "live" Linux from a CD (which I've never done). I also plan to try an installation of XP.

Nope, this computer has been running fine for years, not a whole lot of noticeable difference in response from my 1.6 GHz machine ... until .... *something* suddenly is messed up in the last week or so. It has to be something simple, but so far no one has any idea what it could be. Doesn't make sense.

Thanks again,
Ted