Windows 7 slow despite clean install and copious hardware capabilities

Question

I recently got a nasty piece of malware of some sort that forced me to do a complete re-install. It was actually probably I good thing - my old windows was filled with random junk that should have been cleared out anyways. Long story short, I started from scratch with a fresh re-install and format of all my hard drives.

Strangely enough, I very quickly noticed that the computer was running very slowly. I had never had any speed issues before, even with multiple copies of games running simultaneously, so I was very surprised.

I opened up task manager to check my stats - turns out I was hovering around 12-28% CPU usage and ~3GB RAM (out of the 8 gigs on my machine). Despite this, the computer has been running incredibly slowly since. I've tried all the easy stuff (restarting, defrag...).

Any ideas on what could be going on?

Stats: Alienware Aurora (don't hate :c) Intel i7 - 930 @ 2.80GHz (8CPUs) ~2.8GHz 9216MB RAM Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit

EDIT: I ran a disk check on all my drives - no cigar, windows says everything is fine.

Details: If I had to describe the issue, I'd say it's on again - off again lag. During the 5-30 minute periods where the computer is runing slow, I can barely do anything. Often even the most basic things will freeze up, IE, the task manage will stop responding, and when I open the start menu, typing a letter into the search causes the whole bar to freeze up. Often I am unable to even get a response from ctrl-alt-del. Sometimes it's not quite that crippling, but even still it's bad - I noticed I once opened a folder and it took a very long time to open (sounds like hd issues...). Again, the strange part is that I can use the computer for up to 50 mins without issues, then I have to wait 20 mins or so before it's usable again.

Solution

How exactly did you re-install Windows? Did you use an original DVD, or did you use an existing recovery partition, or some ISO file? Reason I'm asking is because your malware might have been hiding in one of the latter 2 and just reinstalled itself. Or it may have been a rootkit that still roams around. Same if you kept un-checked/un-clean files from your older installation.

Also, you cannot rule out hardware issues - you may have a bad (or overburdened) HD, for example.

Comments

[surfasb]

Saying it's running "slow" doesn't give us a clear picture. It's like asking "Is this chick hot?" but not posting pictures. Might as well use an 8 ball for answer. . .

[guywhoneedsahand]

Just updated OP :)

[guywhoneedsahand]

I re-installed windows from a legitimate windows DVD that came with the computer. When I did the re-install, I formatted my HDs and deleted the all the partitions during setup, so all data SHOULD have been erased, right?

[Lazy Badger]

Do you know ProcessExplorer? Try to use it and detect memory and CPU hog - their usage are higher than I can imagine for ordinary Win7

[guywhoneedsahand]

Really strange - all of a sudden the computer is running much faster. Should I be worried because it might be some sort of virus, or happy that the speed issue was a one-off thing?

[Canadian Luke]

I agree that you haven't ruled out a bad hard drive. Have you run a thorough CHKDSK /f /r on it?

[guywhoneedsahand]

I am running a check on my primary drive as we speak. On another note, I'm running slowly again. I was in the middle of playing a game when suddenly everything slowed to a crawl.

[guywhoneedsahand]

I checked my secondary hard drive - all clean, apparently. Restarting and checking the first...

[Traveling Tech Guy]

I agree with the badger: get Process Explorer and find out if anything is hogging your memory. 3GB RAM is borderline for Win7, especially if you use Firefox with more than 3 tabs open. Throw in a flash movie playing somewhere, and you start experiencing serious paging. Also, are you running a 64 or 32 bit version of Windows? Finally, what's your WEI (Windows Experience Index)? You may find some clues to your bottleneck there

[guywhoneedsahand]

"System Idle Process" is consistently eating 98. some odd CPU, but I think that's normal right? I can't really get any programs quite that high. svchost.exe uses 220,000ish "Private Bytes", and sqlservr.exe users a about 180,000. Those are the two highest under Private Bytes. I'm not really sure what I'm looking for, though... My windows experience index is 5.9, because of my primary hard disk transfer rate - the other components rank in at low to mid 7s. Also, just to clarify - I have 8gigs of ram, I was just explaining that I was using 3 gigs. Not sure if that's what you meant or not...

[Moab]

Clean install of Windows 7 always has a hour or so of housekeeping to do when you first log into your user account, I normally log into a clean install and let it sit for an hour before I start other user tasks. Indexing seems to be the biggest task after a clean install, sometimes it will also do a scheduled defrag of the disk. Normally this housekeeping does not bog a system down, but have seen some that do for unknown reasons.

[guywhoneedsahand]

Must be this - it's been over 2 days now, and I am no longer having issues.