Alienware slowwwwwww down.... performance problems

This should most likely be in general, but feeling amoung the Alienware peers I thought I would just through the question out here. My m15x has had a horrible sloww down. I have done defrag, cleaned my registry, done a virus and spyware scan, free-ed hard drive space and really don't know what to do. Any tips or stuff that Im missing? (No don't want to format... of course then I could put on linux...)

 

is your cpu downclocking? did you check your power profile?

 

Nope all high performance power settings. It seems to be when accessing the disk the major slow downs. What I'm going to try is windows defrag. I have been using Auslogics defrag, so i want to see if there is a difference.

 

did you turn off system restore and indexing? possible that's it, but i doubt it.

 

System resotore I turned down to 2GB and indexing is on, but I also doubt that is the problem.

 

well, i guess it's time to face reality. should return it and get 2 sager 5793's and give me rep for the great advice and the change if you have any leftover.

 

sounds like a potential drive failure. I had this problem with my old laptop where just randomly, one day, the hard drive just started taking forever to load things and therefore slow the entire computer down. It was a permanent hardware issue but I lived with it for about a year until I got this m15x.

my first recommendation would be to start up the computer but then do nothing with it for 10, 20 minutes. That way undoubtedly the computer has loaded everything and is just sitting idle. Then try starting up very small programs like paint. With my old computer, after the partial drive failure, music I was listening to would skip even when I was just loading paint.

 

Hi Marcham89,

Have you tried downloading CCleaner?

You can get it from here: http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/

I know that you had said that you cleaned the registry and cleaned up your HDD space, what did you use?

Have you checked task manager and inspected the processes that are running? You can the click CPU usage column header and see exactly what is using processor cycles...anything odd? Try opening up the task manager window to the max, take a screenshot, and post it here for us to inspect...

KShub

 

Have it I actually gave AW a ring. He suggested a system format and reinstall. He said programs like CCleaner actually slow down the machine sometimes (Thats what happened to his PC). Another note though is instead of Auslogics I ran Windows defrag for once. Which actually seemed to improve the speed a little bit.

 

well I would say run msconfig and turn off everything you don't need in the service and startup.

 

Agreed. I'd especially suggest turning off SuperFetch if you're running Vista. It attempts to "intelligently" cache your most used programs to RAM for faster access. Problems come, however, if your most used programs are massive games, because your HDD is constantly running to shove big files and libraries into RAM. This can seriously hamper drive performance. I turned it off and noticed a major improvement on my current Dell machine.

 

Okay thanks. I don't have my machine for the next two days, but I will try it when I recieve it back. Thanks!

 

I would recommend a free utility like HD Tune to diagnose any potential issues with your Hard Drive. A 1-second SMART analysis might show something amiss which could save you hours of tweaking settings trying to make things speed up. However, if you have the time I'd recommend a more complete scan.

 

I agree with the SMART check. I'm really thinking this may be the issue I had with my old laptop (especially if the hard drive is on heavy usage like any time you load anything)

 

Im going to run HD Tune and see what happens. It is horrible at times even with all startup and services disabled. Looking through folders can have a big delay (to me). Hopefully I don't have to do what the AW tech suggested (Reformatting).

 

Yeah, something's not right. With those specs, there shouldn't be any delay or lag.

 

Okay fixed the problem! The problem was my startup service and process for my anti-spyware program "Spyware Terminator". It was causing for what ever reason the huge lag. It's amazing what one program can do to your machine. Anyway I disabled it and also found out I never needed it since Avast! is anti-virus and anti-spyware. Thanks for your help.

 

so one was scanning the other...

 

Superfetch have the same name in processes in the task manager? or a different name?

I dont recognise it off the top of my head at all.

 

SuperFetch won't show up in the Task Manager process list. Go to "Local Services" in Control Panel (or type "services.msc" into the Run dialog), and find SuperFetch in that list. Right-click to select properties and disable.