Dell Vostro Win 7 gone from lightening quick to constantly hanging

BenEadir

Hi all,

I've a 3 year old Dell Vostro 2.4GHz laptop with 4.00GB installed RAM (although it's saying only 2.68GB is usable!) running Win 7 which has gone from being constantly a very fast and responsive machine to constantly hanging with applications 'not responding' all the time. It started happening all of a sudden last week when I was working on a MS Word document into which I dropped images of two MS Excel graphs I had created in another spreadsheet. I actually noticed in the past that the machine struggled to handle that exact same scenario (putting graphic images into an MS Document) and assumed it was that the graphics card in the machine (an NVIDIA GeForce 310M) was just not up to scratch but now the machine is hanging in all kinds of applications even with MS Word closed.

I've run Malware Bytes and CCleaner but that hasn't made any difference so I'm looking for a few pointers if possible.

My current processes are outlined below and the only thing which stands out for me is the number of chrome.exe processes running and the fact one of them is using almost 10 times as much memory as the others. I've re-started the machine several times but that doesn't seem to have had any impact either.



Any and all suggestions much appreciated.

Ben

PogMoThoin

Use CCleaner, go to the tools startup tab and stop the stuff starting you don't need everytime you boot, this is what's slowing your PC. You have 97 processes running, windows itself is about 35. Dells ship with lots of crap you don't need, remove what you don't need in the uninstall tab.

BenEadir

Thanks PMT, I had previously stopped a load of stuff from starting up but I guess some more have crept in so I'll do it again.

I used to bump into you over on the Samsung Galaxy modding thread. You still tweaking? Are you going to get the new S3? Looks amazing but not sure I'll upgrade from my S2 for a while as it's still doing the business for me.

Ben

PogMoThoin

I'm due an upgrade the first week in June I've decided on S3

yoyo

Try disabling some of your Chrome addons, Chroms is using up considerable resources in that screenshot. Chrome does create a seperate process for each tab, so the multiple copies are normal

Nick

Sparks43

BenThere wrote: »

Hi all,

I've a 3 year old Dell Vostro 2.4GHz laptop with 4.00GB installed RAM (although it's saying only 2.68GB is usable!) running Win 7 which has gone from being constantly a very fast and responsive machine to constantly hanging with applications 'not responding' all the time.

Ben

Op are you 32 or 64 bit windows 7?

On the memory a 32 bit os can only see 3.5 GB max of ram and more then likely the graphics card is drawing some for itself

As for Chrome i have had a few issues recently and now that i have some time i am going to look into them

BenEadir

Sparks43 wrote: »

Op are you 32 or 64 bit windows 7?

Hi Sparks,

I'm on Win 32.

Here's a list of processes which run at startup. I already disabled some but am not sure if I can disable any others? I tried disabling SansaDispatch but it won't disable. I think it's a bit of software to manage my Sansa MP3 player which I do use so probably not a resource hog anyway.

Appreciate any suggestions you may have to help me get another 12-18 months out of this machine if possible



Regards,

Ben

PogMoThoin

You've got spyware there, the Spigot toolbar (searchsettings.exe), remove all toolbars in the uninstall tab, including the Google one (if any), you do not want or need any toolbars on your browser, all they do is spy on you. They redirect all your traffic through their site.

Disable all the Epson and Adobe crap. Not sure what sansadispatch is, I'd disable that too. Disable Microsoft Office. They'll all still work you'll just have to launch them manually, you most likely don't need them running every time you boot.

BenEadir

Hi guys,

I did a general tidy up via CCleaner and ran Malware bytes etc but the problem persisted. I noticed it seemed to be most prevalant in Chrome so I focused on that and all of a sudden I got an error message saying the Shockwave plugin had crashed. I researched that a bit and discovered that there is a fairly common problem which leads to overall slow downs of the system related to multiple installs of the Shockwave Flash plugin which conflict with each other.

I checked my plugin's per this article http://www.howtogeek.com/103292/how-to-fix-shockwave-flash-crashes-in-google-chrome and discovered I had THREE different Shockwave Flash plugins so I disabled two of them and now everything is back to normal.

Just sharing the info in case it is of some use to others.

Cheers for the assistance.

Ben