Extremely slow computer

Hi everyone, I'm having a pretty big PC problem that I'm pretty sure is hardware related but I can't narrow it down to anything specifically.

A couple of months ago I got a virus and reformatted my computer. In my haste to backup my music and pictures to a separate hard drive I accidentally left the sata connector for my main hard drive slightly ajar. After reinstalling windows it was running unbearably slow (took about 4 hours just to install) and would take upwards of several minutes to start up and boot into windows as opposed to the normal 15-20 seconds and would be extremely unresponsive once booted. I figured it was my hard drive and got a new one recently (I'm a poor college kid) expecting to have a clean install and no issues, but I'm having the exact same problems. It still takes a long time to boot into windows, and when it does it is unbearably slow.

Normally my computer ran like a champ (for being a couple years old):

DFI Lanparty UT NF590 SLI-M2R/G
BFG Tech GeForce 7950GT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16
CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+
Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s
Pioneer Black 16X DVD+R

I've had RAM issues before, but that was always random restarts, problems booting, BSOD's etc. My problem is just EXTREME slowness, and I can't narrow it down to anything other than it NOT being the hard drive. Any help or advice would be much appreciated. Thanks!

I had the same issue, but mine might be different. It was because I was using IDE cd drives with SATA HDDs. Strange that it may sound... as it should be compatible and should not have affected the drives. Swapping to SATA cd drives solved my problems.

there are a few people you can check with(Zorg, Shadow703793)
Both of these people are good and can help you out

try a linux live CD and see if that is slow as well.

You might try another install. I use 2 ops 1 on 30 trial just 4 OCing that way if it drops files I don't have to do a full install. Some installs will be really crappy.

So far we know that the computer is very slow when booting Windows, a new hard drive and reinstallation didn't resolve the issue (and reinstalling again obviously won't help), the computer froze up trying to load Ubuntu from a CD, etc.

Is your Pioneer Black 16X DVD+R SATA or IDE? If it's SATA, have you tried booting from an IDE device?

I cleared my CMOS and reset my bios settings to factory settings AND reinstalled windows and that did nothing. Windows took around 8 hours to install (from partition to first boot).

Reinstalling Windows will not resolve your issue. Use CPU-Z to provide us with the following info:

- CPU Core Speed, Multiplier, Bus Speed and Rated FSB.
- Memory Timings.

Good thought, download and run Process Explorer v11.21. Click on the CPU header and look for high CPU load.

Your read numbers are in the tank, and something is causing the CPU to get hammered. That is a classic PIO problem, but if you checked then ok.

Run the Sysinternals Process Explorer linked above and find out that's eating the processor cycles.

My CPU seems to be at a constant usage of AT least 60%, though in windows task manager it fluctuates frequently from 15-100%...

Sysinternals process explorer shows:

scchost.exe: 50%-67%
Procexplorer was taking up around 15-16%
and the system idle process was taking 11-18%
services.exe 10.80%

I double checked to make sure my hard drive wasn't PIO.

It seems to go down every once in awhile, and if I leave it alone long enough it doesn't eat up any cpu usage. However, even simple processes like IE or firefox sometimes take up 60%, so I never notice an increase in performance.

Totals:
Handles: 5088
Threads: 273
Processes: 20

Commit Charge:
Total: 164612
Limit: 4037808
Peak: 289032

Physical Memory:
Total: 2095532
Available 1778908~1779308
System Cache: 1486952

Kernel Memory:
Total: 56404~56412
Paged: 33808
Nonpaged:22648

CPU Usage: usually about 59-61% and I have nothing open, though windows is downloading updates.

Yeah, I meant svchost. Right now it's not taking any cycles, but the update is taking 50% and system idle process is 30%. These are processes which shouldn't be taking up much at all. Do you think I could just have cpu with a failing core?

I swapped out the SATA cable and tried a different SATA slot (slot 6 instead of 1), but I didn't try each and every one individually.

I have actually taken my computer completely apart and used a can of air to clean all the fans and parts individually. I never noticed any burnt connectors on my mobo. Air flow should be okay, though not GREAT. I have noticed my cpu is running pretty hot (56C idle) in my bios, and I'm not feeling any hot air blowing out of the back. All my fans work though.

I hope you got the high svshost numbers before you did the update, which was a foolish thing to do, given the state of affairs.

Did you double click on the offender?

I edited my post becaused I missed your reply. From what I can see, Task Manager is normal. Since your system currently uses so little memory, can you disable virtual memory (No paging file)?

I just tried and it ran just as slow.

I'd say that either the motherboard or the CPU is defective. Can you have your components tested at a shop?

It would obviously be nice of xtremecpu to provide the solution.

I vote bad SATA HD. I had a problem much like that last month on my Athlon64-3800+. I have it loaded with HDs on a Gigabyte K8N-SLI MB, and the culprit was a fairly new Seagate 500GB SATA II drive. It was declared flaky by Windows at this time. What was happening is that a few minutes after booting up I got a lot of 100% CPU usage by Explorer. I did not have any Explorer window open to the drive at the time, and was not running any program referencing the drive, and do not allow any indexing of files, so the drive should have been inactive. My theory is the Win XP Pro was checking drive status in normal kernal housekeeping, and got read errors on the drive. I removed the drive and all problems disappeared, but I have not tried recovering the files yet. I suspect many are recoverable, but expect Windows to freak out when it finds the drive present.

My plan is to try access thru a USB adapter. Maybe the OS will not be so picky there. Maybe SMART would have helped me anticipate the failure, but this MB did not seem to have SMART available. I later found that it only shows up in Setup after you enable advanced control mode, by pressing ctrl-F1. This is not documented in any prominant spot I found.

This issue can be caused by any of the below possibilities
1 Several software programs have been installed/uninstalled leaving behind bad files and/or confusing the software.
2 Data Corruption.
3 Corrupt OS.
4 Bad Hardware.
You can try ErrorFix, it can easily speedup your PC. http://www.make-pc-faster.com/