Sluggish PC... any idea?

Mr E

Hi folks,

I got a new graphics card and DVD burner last week, so I took the opportunity to reformat my windows partition and reinstall everything (it had been a year since I did it previously). I installed XP, SP2, latest drivers etc.

The problem is that my PC is really sluggish now (much more so than before). Its not multitasking well (alt tabbing from an intensive app is painful). Screen repainting is slow, shutting down is slow - everything is just.... slower.

Where do I begin troubleshooting?

The PC is a 2.4GHz, 512Mb RAM. The new card is a 9800XT (256mb). I've installed Catalyst 4.9. Are there settings in the Catalyst control panel that could be causing my trouble? What about something in XP SP2?

Any tips appreciated...

TinCool

TmB wrote:

Hi folks,

I got a new graphics card and DVD burner last week, so I took the opportunity to reformat my windows partition and reinstall everything (it had been a year since I did it previously). I installed XP, SP2, latest drivers etc.

The problem is that my PC is really sluggish now (much more so than before). Its not multitasking well (alt tabbing from an intensive app is painful). Screen repainting is slow, shutting down is slow - everything is just.... slower.

Where do I begin troubleshooting?

The PC is a 2.4GHz, 512Mb RAM. The new card is a 9800XT (256mb). I've installed Catalyst 4.9. Are there settings in the Catalyst control panel that could be causing my trouble? What about something in XP SP2?

Any tips appreciated...

I'd try different catalyst drivers, some of them are real buggy. Try different drivers. I've got an 9800XT (256) too and am using 6.14.10.6476 version of the drivers.

Dr. Dre

You might also try, doing a CTRL-ALT-DEL and click the processes tab, then click the CPU tab twice (this should list all processes in order of CPU used) in order to see if any process in particular is consuming your CPU time.
(could do the same with mem usage too)

Mr E

Yep, checked the processes. Nothing jumped out at me. SiSoft Sandra isn't reporting much out of the ordinary. I'll try earlier Catalyst drivers and see if that helps things.

stevenmu

Did you install the latest motherboard drivers, in particular the IDE ones, I had a problem like this with an old VIA based board.

StRiKeR

it sounds like a driver issue alright! check your cpu usage as well, its easy to know then if your system is under load!