Service Pack 2

sroberts82

Hi, I put Windows XP Service pack 2 on my laptop the other day, and now its really slow. The CPU is at 50% constantly now. Has this happened anyone before?

Waldermort

I noticed the same. In my first attempt I downloaded the updates for Microsoft and installed them, I noticed there was a hell of a drag. I then decided to buy a new version with SP2 pre-installed, which is a lot faster. I think what slows the system down is all the darned update packs!

Lost User

Check what is your CPU model. If Intel Celeron, then this is the cause of the problem. And also check your physical RAM and what kind of application that you normally run in a normal mode. Check which application consume most of the memory. If your computer have two partition you should move a page file from the first partition to the second partition and increase the size for page file.

Mike Dimmick

Best suggestion I can offer is to download Process Explorer[^] and see which process is using all the CPU time. If you post which process that is, maybe we can help. Windows XP has a flaw in Explorer where, if you right-click a file that isn't selected, and the Task Pane has to adjust its size, a thread goes into an infinite loop and uses 100% of one processor (or physical or logical core on dual-core or hyperthreading processors). This condition goes away once you dismiss the context menu. If the process is a svchost.exe process, or 'System' (which isn't a true processes), then double-click it, and go to the Threads tab. This will show the threads running in the process - make a note of the one that's using the CPU time. For best results, download and install the Debugging Tools for Windows[^], set the _NT_SYMBOL_PATH environment variable for access to the Microsoft Symbol Server (see here[^] for how to do this), and point Process Explorer to the Debugging Tools version of dbghelp.dll via Options, Configure Symbols.

Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder