[Velius2820]

I'm having a strange problem with my computer at the moment. It started a little while ago anyways, the computer every few minutes will stall and then after about 15-45 seconds of the computer in it's frozen state it will continue on like normal and I can continue with work or whatever I may be doing. I had this problem a few weeks ago and just did a system restore to fix it but this time ive already restored a few times and it is not fixing the problem. Does anyone have any idea what I should do to fix this, a friend says it might be time for a reformat, it has been about a year or so since my last one. Thanks for any help.

[bonk]

How muck memory(Ram) does the PC have installed.

Has the PC been cleaned out of dust lately

Been Defragged lately

Is it getting hot?

Check the temperature Try this free utility to see how warm your CPU is SpeedFan

[1101doc]

Bonk's questions must surely be answered. In addition, it might be productive to check to see if there is a background process that is running periodically for a minute or so and hogging the CPU. I would suspect an updater or something like ctfmon. Add the "CPU Time" column to Taskmanager and then click the CPU Time column header a couple three times till everything sorts with System Idle at the top. The culprit will appear in the top few entries if this is the case.

To turn off ctfmon, go to: Control Panel>Regional and Language Options>Languages>Details>Advanced, and check the box that says "Turn off advanced text services." If that creates problems, go back and turn it back on.

[tylerhach]

Here is what i wrote on another forum that didn't give me much help on the topic:

My computer was working fine for the past couple years until i downloaded a bad torrent, this was about 2 weeks ago. I got a virus known as a disk cleaner that was very annoying, so i decided to get rid of it with heavy virus removal programs since programs like mcafee, adware, spybot s&d weren't strong enough.

Theses programs managed to get off the virus, but also screwed it up i think too, or so i thought. Since my computer was well due for a reformat since i bought it in 2003. The stalling started and i just said **** it and put all my stuff on an external and reformatted my comp.

I decided to reformat which cleaned up other bad stuff on my computer and made my computer feel like new, in fact i was playing World of Warcraft about 2 days ago on my newly reformatted computer fine with lock ups or stalling. Everything was going fine until yesterday when i installed my sound drivers and Windowblinds, which i both got from legitimated websites that would have no viruses or spyware. This is weird because it shouldn't of effected anything really.

The stalling/lockup consists of my computer pausing for about 3 to 5 seconds in intervals of 3 seconds usually when i open programs like Firefox, iTunes, World of Warcraft, so basically programs that use more memory. This never use to happen, i could of had all those open and it would only lag a little with no stalling/locking up or anything.

•Processor: AMD Athlon XP 2600+ 2.08 GHz

•Ram: 1 GB

•OS: WindowsXP professional

•Video Card: 7600 gforce xfx

•Motherboard: ASUS nforce2 Ultra 400 A7N8X-E Deluxe

•Hard Drive: 120 gig

•Power Supply: 420 watts

•Sound Card: Sound blaster Live! 5.1 Digital

To make a long story short, My computer worked fine, then i got a virus, I cleaned the virus with heavy programs, after the clean up computer starts stalling/locking up. I reformat. Everything seems to work fine till for some reason when i install sound drivers and windowblinds it goes back to stalling/locking up.

My guess is maybe its my hardrive or my ram, but i could be horribly wrong.


i think we have a very similar problem, and my current idea is it might be a dieing motherboard.

[theriddler]

check your cpu usage and see if its hovering around 90 %, my computer had more or less the same problem it would just freeze up and go slow, in the end I would have to reset it, cookiegal fixed it for me
also try hijackthis and get somone to check that your computer isnt riddled with spyware and viruses,

last thing is I have got a friend like yours

reformatting is the anwser to everything

good luck


1101doc, what does ctfmon do, thats always running as a process in my taskmanager

[tylerhach]

see, i did reformat and that didn't fix it, then i changed the sata cord from the motherboard to the hard drive, and that fixed it for a little bit, then it went back to being bad, so then i plugged in extra fan, that worked for a bit also, but then it went back to the lagging. now my computer cant detect a hard drive i dunno what is wrong im so lost.

[theriddler]

tylerhach are you Velius2820?

[tylerhach]

nope, just have a similar problem.

[theriddler]

sorry lol, I thought you where just explaining it on an other account, my mistake

[1101doc]

Ctfmon: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/282599/

[theriddler]

thank you !