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Problem description: An acquaintance asked me a question about why her computer was performing badly, and I've never seen anything like this so I'm interested in figuring out what's wrong. It's a Dell Vostro 260 with an i3-2100. The machine runs unbelievably slowly. If I go into the BIOS I can watch the screen draw and there's something like a half second of latency between a key press and response. Windows is reporting the proper 3.1ghz speed and the task manager performance graph shows about what I would expect for CPU utilization, but most or all things take far longer than they should. She does have some suspicious looking crap installed but I'm fairly certain that this BIOS behavior is abnormal so I didn't jump straight to flatten and reinstall. It doesn't crash or anything, it just runs extremely slowly. I didn't have time to look inside the machine yet. I'm mostly looking for ideas to try when I get a chance to look at the thing again, because like I said I'm genuinely interested in figuring out what could cause this behavior. Attempted fixes: Not much, it's so unbearably slow that the only thing I could do in the time I had was disabling SpeedStep to see it it would force the processor to clock up. Recent changes: User alleges nothing, certainly no hardware changes, the machine is in one desk behind another and she couldn't get it out if she wanted to. It does have plenty of air circulation, it's just impossible to remove without moving a decent sized office desk. -- Operating system:Win 7, don't remember what edition System specs: Dell Vostro 260, i3-2100, using the IGP, 4gb ram, 250gb seagate HD. Location: US I have Googled and read the FAQ: Yes
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Feb 19, 2015 18:52
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Most likely the CPU is throttling due to critical overheating because the heatsink has come loose, check CPU temperatures to confirm and remount the heatsink to fix.
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Feb 19, 2015 21:37
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It's definitely not thermally throttling. I opened it up, the fans drop to nice slow speeds almost instantly after power on. I pulled the heatsink off, cleaned it and the IHS, found a nice divot in both thanks to Dell's quality workmanship, put new thermal paste on it. I couldn't check the actual temps because I didn't have access to an admin account today (I assume that's why HWMonitor would only give me a CPU utilization listing) but I am sure it's not a CPU temp issue. I still find this behavior extremely weird. CPU utilization never comes close to even maxing a single core, you'll see both real cores spike to ~50% and the HT cores go up to maybe 10% at the absolute most. I listened to it with the case open and noticed that the power supply will begin making some really hosed up noises after it's been on for 30 seconds or so, not fan noises but the sort of thing you would expect to hear from a power supply that's having to respond to rapidly cycling power demands. Could just be that it's a lovely 4 year old power supply and some caps are making noise, or it could be a symptom of something happening on the motherboard. I can't see it being the actual problem because the machine is totally stable and I have never seen or heard of a power supply impacting performance. I'm pretty sure this thing is totally hosed but I'm really interested in understanding how this could be happening.
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Feb 27, 2015 23:40
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K8.0 posted:Could just be that it's a lovely 4 year old power supply and some caps are making noise, or it could be a symptom of something happening on the motherboard. I can't see it being the actual problem because the machine is totally stable and I have never seen or heard of a power supply impacting performance. It's possible for a failing PSU to do something like that. Or it could be the RAM or some part of the motherboard. K8.0 posted:(I assume that's why HWMonitor would only give me a CPU utilization listing) but I am sure it's not a CPU temp issue. You could try using realtemp: http://www.techpowerup.com/realtemp/
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Mar 1, 2015 06:15
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