computer is as slow as dicks - Hardware & Software

help yesterday when i got home from work and started up my computer, it was running really slow! webpages would take minutes to load if at all, IM windows on steam would took like ten seconds to show up on my desktop after i saw them appear in the taskbar, even freecell was a little slow to start. so i figured id restart my computer! the shutting down took really long, and on startup it pretty much stopped at the "starting windows" screen. i managed to get to system restore but that didnt work, it was also stuck and after about 15 hours of running it still was trying to work. i probably should have just let it keep going but i restarted again it managed to boot but it was still hideously sluggish. i got to see my wallpaper!!! but nothing worked, explorer.exe pretty much froze it was gross. now i tried to restart into safe mode but its taking a century to boot into it too. practically stuck trying to load all the safe mode files a few days ago i had updated my video drivers for the first time in a while, and i think there was a windows update before my computer started shitting every bed in a fifty mile radius. id love to avoid reformatting etc etc im a bad pc gamner and dont know all my specs off the back of my hand but ill give what i know -win7 64bit -ati radeon 5800 series (updated drivers to 14.4 from 13.0 iirc) -6gb memory

How new/old is your system? I feel as if while not completely necessary to mention it would be helpful to any real tech-savvy people. (And [I]wow[/I], dicks must be pretty slow if they're like you say.)

got it brand new around 4 years ago and yes dicks dont really move around very much on their own

Well, if you have a decent machine four years shouldn't bring it to be that slow... I'm not incredibly smart when it comes to computers- but I would recommend bringing it into a shop or something like that, unless someone else comes along here and reveals a solution. Sorry, that I can't help, I wish you the best of luck.

hard drive i think

If you can get into the desktop in safe mode, click start, then run (I think that's how you do it, been a long time since I had to deal with windows) and type msconfig. If there's no run bit then holding down the windows key and hitting R should bring up the run menu - just type msconfig into that and hit enter. This will bring up a tool with a couple of different tabs that show what is being run on startup. I'm betting there's a shedload of crapware that shouldn't be there. I'm inclined to think it's something to do with the new graphics driver though if it started acting up straight after that was installed. If you have system restore enabled, try rolling back to before then. I thought that safe mode didn't load the fancy GFX drivers though...perhaps it was some piece of crapware that was shovelled in with the install. If you can get into safe mode, uninstall that GFX driver and let us know if there's any change.

Try running a SMART tool and see in which state your harddrive is, this can be run from a different drive as well. So I guess putting Linux on a USB stick and checking is possible.

[QUOTE=dead_;45764860]Well, if you have a decent machine four years shouldn't bring it to be that slow... I'm not incredibly smart when it comes to computers- but I would recommend bringing it into a shop or something like that, unless someone else comes along here and reveals a solution. Sorry, that I can't help, I wish you the best of luck.[/QUOTE] That might be a bad idea unless its a good shop if you send it anywhere, be VERY careful. Most shops, especially geek squad, will 100% completely fuck you out of your money and outright lie to you.

[QUOTE=J!NX;45765591]That might be a bad idea unless its a good shop if you send it anywhere, be VERY careful. Most shops, especially geek squad, will 100% completely fuck you out of your money and outright lie to you.[/QUOTE] Speaking of geek squad and likely hard drive failures, the one in my area told people for months when W8 came out that their hard drive has failed and data was unrecoverable because they were trying to read GPT partitions with XP machines.

[QUOTE=withnail;45765120]If you can get into the desktop in safe mode, click start, then run (I think that's how you do it, been a long time since I had to deal with windows) and type msconfig. If there's no run bit then holding down the windows key and hitting R should bring up the run menu - just type msconfig into that and hit enter. This will bring up a tool with a couple of different tabs that show what is being run on startup. I'm betting there's a shedload of crapware that shouldn't be there. I'm inclined to think it's something to do with the new graphics driver though if it started acting up straight after that was installed. If you have system restore enabled, try rolling back to before then. I thought that safe mode didn't load the fancy GFX drivers though...perhaps it was some piece of crapware that was shovelled in with the install. If you can get into safe mode, uninstall that GFX driver and let us know if there's any change.[/QUOTE] there was a piece of crapware i got with the driver update but i thought id stopped it from starting with windows. but if it cant even boot into safemode then i dont think its any startup program and yeah it cant boot into safemode. im inclined to assume even if it did, it would still be impossibly slow [editline]22nd August 2014[/editline] [QUOTE=Killervalon;45765582]Try running a SMART tool and see in which state your harddrive is, this can be run from a different drive as well. So I guess putting Linux on a USB stick and checking is possible.[/QUOTE] i will look into this when i get home

Before doing ANYTHING, back up your data. Don't do any scans or anything HDD intensive. sounds like your HDD is about to give out.

May I recommend Hirens Boot CD? It has a lot of low level tools to diagnose hardware and clean out software. Plus it has a MiniXp environment that you can run to access files and run more tests from.