Computer Suddenly Cripplingly Slow

[waddleman]

I've had this system for about a year now with no changes of any kind to any of the hardware. I've been playing games like SC2, Amnesia, New Vegas, on the highest settings with a pretty good framerate throughout. However, when I brought my computer back home from school for winter break it can't run anything worth a damn. I get about a frame per second playing SC2 on the lowest settings once it gets later in the game, when I used to get a pretty good one running at max.

I tried to solve the problem in a variety of ways, I cleaned up my HD, defragged, updated my card's drivers, clocked up my card and processor and nothing seems to be helping in the slightest. My friend using literally all my old PC's parts is running every single game faster than mine and I'm just getting generally sick of all my games suddenly being completely unplayable.

I've got a radeon 4890, phenom 2 x4 3.0ghz that's running at 3.5 right now, and 4 gigs of dual channel memory. I've tried just about everything at this point and nothing seems to be able to get my computer to run any games even remotely close to what it was literally 4 hours before I plugged it in here. I know it's not spyware, because the last thing I was doing was gaming and the first thing I did with the computer when I plugged it back in was start up SC2. Nothing damaged the card, it's tested fine on a variety of programs and it's not running hot at all. I was careful as I always am when I unplugged and replugged the computer in, so that isn't the issue either. I'm simply lost as to why my performance has suddenly taken a massive nosedive in the span of 4 hours in which the computer wasn't even fuckin plugged in. Any help that isn't telling me to do anything I haven't already listed above would be greatly appreciated.

 

[mrkeith]

This is a pretty "out there" kind of guess but maybe the computer isnt getting enough power? Are there other things plugged into the socket to suck the juice from it? I would be going ballistic if i was you right now

Maybe you have a smaller ampage on the breakers

 

[waddleman]

Checked that, and it's fine. My brother plugged his ridiculous system in and it ran fine, thanks though.

 

[GoldenI]

Upgrade to a 6850 or 6870.

 

[jefe323]

did anything get damaged/moved when you were moving the computer from school to your house?

 

[Herr_Koos]

Check for any programs running in the background. Also, verify that your CPU and GPU are ramping up to full speed when gaming.

 

[13thmonkey]

unplug and reseat everything ,if the gpu has become partially unseated it might be running a pci-ex1?

 

[Hawkeye22]

I think it would be worth it to scan for viruses/malware just to eliminate it as a cause. With some of these zero-day exploits these days, you just never know what can sneak into your system.

 

[waddleman]

Nothing was damaged moving, I tested each part individually earlier today and there's no issues with anything. Scanned for malware again with a couple different programs, but no dice. I've already checked for background programs a couple times. I think I'm going to see if just reloading windows will solve any of this.

 

[dn2222]

Now I am no expert here, But I had a similar problem when I moved my computer from one end of the room to the other. Don't know if it was the move that did it or just coincidence. Everything went slower and slower till eventually Windows would only boot up 10% of the time. My hard drive ended up being the thing that was starting to take a total ***. You could always try swapping that out with ur brothers just to see if thats the problem. I got a new hard drive and problem solved. Of course now I've got other problems but thats for a different thread.

 

[edmond419]

Did the CPU fan fall out during transport? If it did the CPU will slow down to try to keep the temp down

 

[frozentundra123456]

I would agree with dn2222. I had a comp that kept getting slower and slower, and finally would not even load windows. Turns out the hard drive was bad. One year for the hard drive to fail seems awfully early, but I have had 2 hard drive failures in a period of about 6 years.

My suggestions would be to run an antivirus (Microsoft security essentials is free), and a couple of spyware clean up programs such as ad-aware, 12 ghosts wash, or CC cleaner. If you are connected to the internet anything can happen.

Then make sure all the components such as your graphics card and ram are seated properly.

Finally, if all else fails, reloading windows should solve the problem, but if you go that far, you might just consider a new hard drive as well.

 

[Crazy Hitchhiker]

^ bump to all who suggested reseating the components, checking the cables, and checking out the hdd.