Extreme problems with XP Pro. System very slow.

[Druegan]

Salutations all,

I really hope someone can help me out here. I recently had a power failure that kinda messed up my machine, and it hasn't worked right since. I'm hoping someone can tell me what might be wrong, because I've spent almost 3 weeks trying to fix it.

I'm running an 2.53Ghz P4 on an Intel D850EMV2 mainboard with 1GB of PC800 RDRAM. Sound Card is a SB Live! and the Video Card is a WinFast A250 (with the nVidia Geforce 4 Ti 4400 chipset and 128mb video ram.)

Here's what happened in a nutshell. System is a custom build, was running XP Home. I was gone for a few days visiting friends, power failure happened while I was gone, I got back, system was hosed. The only thing I could find wrong was a corrupted AGP440.sys file and the BIOS settings had been reset. Or as best as I could tell.

System wouldn't boot, so I checked the BIOS settings. They were reset to their defaults, so I had to reset them. No problems there. I get into the actual loading of windows. Windows wouldn't load normally. In Safe Mode, Windows would load everything up till AGP440.sys and then would drop and reboot again. I was thinking "I'll just put the XP home disc in and repair the install." Except I couldn't find the disc. *grumble*

Moving alot and being generally less than perfectly organized tends to do such things.

So, I pulled the drive, slapped it into my roomie's machine, backed up my files, and reinstalled it into mine. I wiped the drive, fdisked and formatted to NTFS, and installed a copy of 2k pro I had laying around. 2k Pro did -NOT- like my system. Didn't like the video card drivers, wouldn't install off the video card drivers cd to fix that. Also ran slower than hell. So, after feuding with it for a while, I said "hell with it" and went out and bought a copy of XP Pro (with SP1)

Wiped Drive and Installed XP Pro. Installation took FOREVER. But it installed. And, XP Pro liked my drivers. had no problems with vid card, sound card.. in fact, all my devices installed without a hitch.

Network connectivity was fine, and I was on the 'net instantly. Problem is, everything is running slower than molasses in january. System resources are consumed at an extremely alarming rate. In fact, right now, with just IE 6 and Windows Task Manager running, 60-80% of system resources are being used.. it jumps up and down between those. 40-60% of those are consumed with me just typing this in IE, the other 20 are between task manager (which steadily eats about 5%,) and system, lsass and svchost.

The first thing telling me something is amiss is that XP Pro takes about 5 minutes, sometimes longer, to boot up. It also seems to flash my monitor screen during the boot process 3 times or so for some odd reason. It takes even longer to shut down.

I have done the following:

Turned all the little XP graphical resource wasters off.

Gone to Blackviper.com and consulted his services guide for disabling unneeded services and disabled said services.

Downloaded the latest drivers for the video cards, sound cards and the like from their respective manufacturers and installed them.

Updated the BIOS with the latest version.

Ran "Hot CPU Tester Pro (lite version)" and executed the Diagnostic routines, which performed a 6 hour series of system tests on the processor, memory, and hard disks and came back reporting no errors.

Ran chkdsk /F on the system drive. It came back clean.

Checked that both XP Pro and the BIOS report the proper amount and speed of Ram, and correctly identify the processor. They do. Both also identify the hard drive properly.

Checked Device Manager for driver conflicts or problems. None are indicated.

Frankly, I'm at a loss. Even the game Morrowind installed and executed, albeit extremely slowly. It is like everything on my system is running, but it is doing so at a snail's pace. The hardware on this system should be just zipping through this sort of thing.. IE should be MAYBE consuming 10% of system resources if I have multiple instances of the browser loaded, not 40-60% with just one window.

So, does anybody have any clue what may be wrong, or what I might try next? I'm seriously running out of ideas. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,
Druegan