My computer is lagging diagnosis program?

Question

My computer keeps lagging with my CPU in the 3 or 4% area I am running Windows 7 and have been for a while I suspect my harddrive of failing and thus being the cos. Maybe it is also the motherboard or grafics card... I don't really know how to diagnosis this, since RAM and CPU seem to be at an okay level.

Computer is a self built computer parts: Motherboard P5QC CPU Intel E6750 (2,66 Dualcore) Grafics NVidia 8600GT OS Windows 7 x64 RAM 3 GB Harddrive WD5002ABYS Soundcard Creative X-Fi Platium

Solution

1. Press Ctrl-Shift-Escape in windows to launch the task manager. Go to the Performance tab. See how much virtual/paged memory is being used. If it's more than about 10% of physical memory, you need to use your memory more wisely (by closing programs you're not using, etc.) or get more memory. The Processes tab in task manager can help identify memory hogs (click the Memory header to sort by that).

2. Check your hard drive's smart status to see if it's failing.

3. Check your CD ROM drive is working and not hanging on access attempts. If necessary, disconnect it (when the computer is shutdown) to verify that it's not the issue.

4. Run resmon (start->run->"resmon.exe", return), and check the disk stats etc.

5. Run mmc.exe; add the Performance Monitoring snap-in. Left click on Console Root->Performance (local)->Monitoring Tools->Performance Monitor. Right click the white graph area that appears, and add counters. Check the number of interrupts that are occuring.

6. Run administration tools->Event Viewer, and look for problems.

7. Boot a Linux LiveCD, and see if problems still occur. If not, it's something in your windows setup, at least, assuming Linux is enabling all the same hardware. It's worth booting Linux in verbose mode to see if it says anything about blacklisting bad devices etc.

Comments

[Andrew Keith]

it would help if you provide some actual details in your post. We dont know what computer you are using ?