Troubleshoot Slow Windows

Posted on January 25th, 2008 by thehabgroup

After much contemplation you have dipped into your pocket and forked out a decent amount of cash to buy a new computer. The computer is likely built with eye dazzling hardware such as Intel Duo core processors oodles of memory and preload with either Windows XP or Vista. You boot up the computer login and Windows is blazing fast as the salesman promised.

Let roll forward a few months after many Internet downloads and application installations. More than likely you have come to the realization that overtime your Windows machine will get slower and slower. If someone was to collect a dollar from every Windows user that had this complaint they would be a multi-millionaire.

So how do we solve this problem when it arises? Well, the quick and dirty way is to re-install the Windows OS and re-install your essential application. Unfortunately, there are many of us out there that hestitate to do this step as you will loose applications for which you do not have installation files. This means that you will have to go through the process of cleaning up your machine. Here are a few troubleshooting steps to isolate and cleanup the source of the sources of this sluggish problem.

Make a note of some of the activities that you notice slowness (e.g. browsing the Internet, launching applications, login etc.).
Reboot your machine into Safe Mode with Networking (Hold the F8 key while booting and select Safe Mode with networking)
Once you login verify whether you observe the same sluggishness of the OS.
If you do not see the problem in Safe Mode then it likely that something (driver, service, application, malware) is loaded in Normal Mode that is slowing down your machine. This is good news proceed to step 6.
If the problem still exists then check: a) if the issue exists with another user account b) low disk space on the system drive c) defragmented hard drive d) hardware errors
While still in safe mode with networking open your Internet browser and navigate to http://housecall.trendmicro.com or you favourite online malware scanner of choice and initiate a full scan of your computer with the cleaning option.
Once the scan is completed, reboot into normal mode and observe if you have the same slowness.
If yes, then click Start -> Run -> type msconfig. Msconfig is a little used but powerful troubleshooting tool provided by Microsoft.
Select the Services tab and check the “Hide all Microsoft Services” option.
Now you will have a list of all “3^rd party application services
Disable all the 3^rd party services and reboot the computer. Check if you have the problem
If you do not have the problem then one or more of the services you disabled is the source of you problem. You will have to enable and disable individual services to isolate the culprit. You can use the msconfig utility to renable your services.
If the problem still exists after disabling all 3^rd party services then repeat the process with the startup items in the msconfig utility.
If neither services or startup items resolve the slowness then consider using a registry cleaner and some applications do not uninstall cleanly and leave orphan entries in the registry. Registry cleaners are abundantly available on the Internet.
Consider removing any unnecessary applications, toolbar, files from the computer.