Classic British Flight Sim

Hi all,

I was wondering whether anyone could assist with a little problem that I have discovered with my laptop since this morning. Basically it now seems to take an eternity to boot up (normally takes under 30 seconds for desktop to appear). Once the desktop and all the icons appear it then seems to be really laggy and slow with any applications taking a while to fire up once the icon is clicked. FSX and games themselves are not playing ball either and appear stuttery or laggy as if the laptop is struggling with them. The laptop just does'nt appear to be firing on all cylinders at the moment.

I have never had this issue before and I almost daily use spyware programs such as Ad-aware and Spybot. My anti-virus is AVG which has run a full scan and not picked anything up and I have also ran CCleaner which I conduct religiously everytime I come off-line. And no I have'nt been on any dodgy sites.

The laptop is an Acer 9513WSMi;

Intel duo T2400 (1.83GHz)
NVidia 7900 GS 512MB
240GB 5400rpm HDD
2GB DDR2 RAM
WINDOWS XP Home edtn

Any ideas gents? Or at least where should I start checking?

Thanks in advance.

Hi Vegas,

Whats running in task manager. Sounds like something is hogging CPU cycles or memory or disk I/O

As a very basic check, open task manager and sort by percentage CPU and look to see what the top processes are and let us know. ;-)

Hi Ben,

here is a copy of the processes. Thanks for your time.

Hi Vegas...

The totals at the bottom show cpu usage of only 12%, so I guess its not a CPU problem. A tip is to click on the colum heading... in your sceenshot "c..." (this would say CPU if the column was expanded) anyway, by clicking in it, it would sort it from highest to lowest... clicking on it again will sort it lowest to highest. All achedemic in this case though.

Could you do a screen shot of the performance tab when its running slow?

Also, if you look in the event logs just after you log on and see if there are any funnies. To acces the event logs, right click on "My Computer" and select "Manage"

On an XP machine (from memory) the three logs are Application, System and security. The most recent entries are at the top of the logs, so in each case (but most likely the system or Application log) check for errors or warnings within the time window of your last log on. (Check the date as well as I've seen errors in event logs, but then relised an hour later that although the time is similar to when I was have the problem, the date was from weeks earlier. STUPID )

Hi Ben,

tried all that matey as you instructed and it does'nt appear to throw anything out of the ordinary up. Perhaps a de-frag may help? I'll try that and report back.

*Edit*

Well I tried to de-frag. Got to 98% analysis then this prompt came up.



Now I'm really lost!

Well you could run CHKDSK /f on the command line and that may well fix the error in that Nvidia driver file. You would then be able to successfully defrag

You could also download and install the latest Nvidia WHQL approved driver.

Hi Peter,

tried the chkdsk and it cleared a few issues up including the de-frag which I have now done and its not made a blind bit of difference!

Heres the status of the machine shortly after desktop (finally) appears during start-up





This is driving me mad..Help! :brick:

Something is using 30% of your CPU but it is not seen in that screenshot - try doing as Ben suggested - click on the column labelled "C.." to sort the CPU use to see what is hogging it. At the moment the tasks are sorted by memory usage.

Here is a shot of the CPU activities as requested. Slow slow slow and I'm still baffled!