system brutally slow

[BouncingSoul]

So I get a call today about a slow system. I VNC to the system and it says "Loading your personal settings" (it's Win2k btw). The lady that called says it's been like that since she tried to login when she got here..... 4 hours ago.

I managed to eventually get it to task manager and sure enough, it shows the system has been on for almost 4 hours and its still not at the desktop. In fact explorer.exe isn't even running yet. I can't use the task manager to launch a new task, probably because she's not a local admin. I eventually get the system to the desktop and but I can't do anything with it. I check all the startup tasks and they are normal, there isn't any obvious pieces of spyware, but I can't scan to be sure since it won't load anything in less than an hour. I log her out and try to log myself in and its still taking a boat load of time, it's been on the loading personal settings screen now for 15 minutes. Is there a chance we have bad hardware? If so what kind of bad hardware would it be?

The system is older but not ancient. It's a 2 ghz P4 with 512 megs of ram. Any good ideas?

 

[kcnychief]

Assuming it's on a domain, I would think it's having DNS issues but that is excessive. Check the event viewer on the machine for errors, don't need to log in to do so. Remotely Manage the machine and pull up the logs.Also try to ping it, see if there is any packet loss.

 

[BouncingSoul]

There are a boat load of errors, including some netlogon errors. It's booting faster now that its in my office. Wonder if it's just a bad network cable or something.

 

[lancer]

could be a bad nic try replacing that.

 

[BouncingSoul]

could be a bad nic try replacing that.

It appears you are right. I didn't think you were until I tried to copy some files to the network and it would randomly lose connection. Popped a new nic in and it runs fast and steady.

Reps for the help!

**EDIT**

I owe you some reps, system won't let me give it to you again. sorry.

 

[Not Bman]

sry if this is done with but, the system itself was runnning extremly slow, and it was a network card? How can that be, how does that have anything to do with it? Or am I mistaken with the question

 

[BouncingSoul]

I didn't think it was possible either but it is on a domain and it was failing to connect to the active directory and what not. All I know is after that card was replaced it ran good as new.

 

[Not Bman]

That's really weird, I guess I should watch out for that these days.

Glad it's fixed

 

[lancer]

I only knew that because i've had the same issue a few times in the past, glad i could help.

 

[ShepsCrook]

It's because the computer was trying to figure out what was wrong with the hardware basically, it's trying to use it but it's having a hard time doing so. I've had similar issues when I had a HD beginning to fail. The computer is just trying to use it when it really shouldn't because it's about to die.

Kinda like if I chopped your leg off, you're having to learn how to stay balanced with 1 leg. It will take you a bit or even be very had, but you want to be able to stay mobile. That's a very rough comparison.