DIGIT-ARC read-only archive · snapshot: July 23, 2026

WinXP slowing down

8 posts · originally from https://geek.digit.in/community/threads/winxp-slowing-down.33465/

soham
soham Original post #1
Aug 6, 2006 at 6:35 PM
My pc has recently been infected by a lot of trojans and viruses. I reinstalled xp with sp2 over it and scanned and removed all the trojans in the pc. Though all the probs of applications not running have disappeared, i find my pc still very slow. On carefull observation i found that the system idle process was hogging most of the cpu. I rechecked for any virus but found none. Can anyone help?
Thanks.
:sad:
anandk
anandk #2
Aug 6, 2006 at 7:01 PM
generic advice : scan ur pc in SAFE MODE with one antivirus (avast/avg) and atleat 2 anti-spys (adaware & ewido). run ccleaner to clear pc junk. reduce ur startup entries.

posting ur hijackthis logfile here would help someone analyse the problem....
siriusb
siriusb #3
Aug 6, 2006 at 7:41 PM
If you notice more carefully, system idle process has a priority of zero. This means that it cannot, in a milion years, preempt any other thread. So don't worry about that one. Look at any non-essential and essential app's settings for the source of slowdowns.
soham
soham #4
Aug 6, 2006 at 8:11 PM
Hey guys, wait i cant right click on my system idle process on task manager. then how come i know its priority is zero.
siriusb
siriusb #5
Aug 6, 2006 at 8:55 PM
Select View->Select Columns... in task manager and check "Base priority".
The priority for system idle process should be "N/A". It's basically a 16KB loop that runs when no process is active.
Post your hijackthis log instead.
S
Aug 6, 2006 at 9:32 PM
System idle time cannot possibly hog system resources. As sirius says, it is basically a empty thread that loops while Windows has nothing else to do...

First things first - checking for viruses, spyware,etc... Run scans in safe mode, post hijackthis log, etc.

Second - Run ccleaner to remove junk from your system
Third - Run a defrag on your system. Also, get the software called PageDefrag and use it to defrag your registry.
Fourth - Check your page file size and make it fixed. If possible, keep it on the first partition of a secondary hard disk.
Fifth - Disable unnecessary services (through services.msc) and startup items (through msconfig)
Sixth - Use tweaking software such as TweakUI and Xteq X-Setup to finetune your system. Also, check out xpAntispy and TuneXP

Arun
soham
soham #7
Aug 6, 2006 at 10:37 PM
here's the hijackthis log file :
samrulez
Aug 7, 2006 at 12:05 PM
If its not a virus ,spyware prob..........it much be sue to fragmentation.............Defragment u r hdd.......