erratic behavior with mouse and system slowdown

[rita]

Am not a real techy person, so please bear with me. The past few days my computer has begun to act very strangely. The mouse becomes very erratic and will not move the way I want it to move. My system slows down to a crawl. Feel like I am using an old 286 and I have a 450AMD with 256 RAM.Tonight it has been the worst. I have rebooted the computer numerous times and nothing has helped. It is taking 4 or 5 times longer for a program to open up, if it even does. Sometimes the hour class never stops and I close the program using the Ctrl-Alt-Delete feature. I have done a thorough scan, checked for viruses, checked to make sure all the fans are working properly and none of this has helped. One strange thing I did notice is that I am losing time on the computer. Yesterday, I reset the clock because I had lost some time. Today when I got back on, I had lost over 30 minutes, but when I rebooted the computer, the clock was at the correct time again. Don't know if any of this is related, just an observation. Any help you can give me would be appreciated.

Rita

http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

[mjc]

The first thing I would do is find the CMOS battery and replace it...that should take care of the time problem. The mouse could probalby stand, in this order, a good cleaning (with the power off), a check for "ghost drivers" (requires looking at device manager in Safe Mode (f5 at boot should boot you into it directly)), a possible driver update and maybe after all that if it still occurs a replacement (the wires in a the mouse cable are 22AWG or smaller). Defrag is also in order...be prepared it may take a while.

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mjc
Links list:Computer Links (http://www.dreamwater.org/tech/mjc/index.htm)

Celts are the men that heaven made mad, For all their battles are merry and their songs are all sad.

[rocketwils]

http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/eek.gif No way! I am also a first-time user of this forum, and sought it out after searching through the PC Guide troubleshooting sections because is have EXACTLY EXACTLY the same symptoms!

Makes me wonder if there's an undiscovered virus of some sort. I appreciate MJC's previous reply, but my guess is that it does not hit the mark.

My system:
Win98
PII-350Mhz
Peripherals include: Logitech cordless mouse and keyboard, CD, CD-RW and the usual (HDD, floppy, etc).
All expansion cards are PCI PnP except a SCSI scanner card is ISA (I think)

My symptoms:
Clock losing time DAILY
System slowdowns, with erratic/slow mouse movement
Word (for example) takes forever to launch
Also noted some harddisk activity when the system and mouse slow down.

My actions:
Updated McAfee and scanned complete system, all files, several times
Used standalone NIMDA virus scanner from McAfee, All clean.
Tried to learn about the mysterious world of IRQs; only thing I could find was that my IRQ11 is assigned to the graphics controller AND the networking card... I suspect I need to reassign something, but I sure cannot figure out how to do that (was targeting moving networking card to IRQ9, since my now-used 56k modem uses that IRQ).

I feel like I might be going off in the weeds on this... and am burning a lot of time trying to figure this out...

HELP! Techno Geeks Unite! Amateurs Rita and John are bamboozled!
Thanks! John Rocketwils@yahoo.com

[rocketwils]

By the way, MJC, I will do your Grand Master Geek bidding and replace the CMOS battery. But in your experienced opinion, could that battery being low lead to erratic mouse behavior and system slowdown? Thx John

[mjc]

Time problem..definitely, slowdown and mose problems...maybe, the default settings for the BIOS are not optimized in any way therefore with a dying battery the settings will not be stable (could even go as far as not allowing you to boot..by changing the drive settings and making so that it is not recognized). This is also a starting point, it is cheap and easy (Wal-Mart even carries the most common baterries)...and can, after restoring the BIOS to what is best for your system, help or solve the problem.

As for other causes, viri can and do cause system slowdowns, so do mis-configured NICs, driver conflicts, bad installs/uninstalls that corrupt or leave a lot of garbage in the registry, age of the install (Windows slows as it ages...mostly due to an accumilation of junk in the registry), being in MS_DOS compatibilty mode (right click My Computer -> Properties -> Performance), background applications...any and all by themselves or in combination.

So do the simple first then start on the harder more complex...a run through an anti-virus program, followed by a defrag isn't a bad idea, either.

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mjc
Links list:Computer Links (http://www.dreamwater.org/tech/mjc/index.htm)

Celts are the men that heaven made mad, For all their battles are merry and their songs are all sad.

[mjc]

Time problem..definitely, slowdown and mose problems...maybe, the default settings for the BIOS are not optimized in any way therefore with a dying battery the settings will not be stable (could even go as far as not allowing you to boot..by changing the drive settings and making so that it is not recognized). This is also a starting point, it is cheap and easy (Wal-Mart even carries the most common baterries)...and can, after restoring the BIOS to what is best for your system, help or solve the problem.

As for other causes, viri can and do cause system slowdowns, so do mis-configured NICs, driver conflicts, bad installs/uninstalls that corrupt or leave a lot of garbage in the registry, age of the install (Windows slows as it ages...mostly due to an accumilation of junk in the registry), being in MS_DOS compatibilty mode (right click My Computer -> Properties -> Performance), background applications...any and all by themselves or in combination.

So do the simple first then start on the harder more complex...a run through an anti-virus program, followed by a defrag isn't a bad idea, either.

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mjc
Links list:Computer Links (http://www.dreamwater.org/tech/mjc/index.htm)

Celts are the men that heaven made mad, For all their battles are merry and their songs are all sad.

[classicsoftware]

I agree with mjc.

1) Replace the CMOS battery.

2) Clean the mouse.

3) Empty the contents of your c:\windows\temp directory

4)Empty the contents of your c:\windows\temporary internet files directory

5) Defrag your hard disk.

If all of this fails to improve the system, you can suspect a virus. I looked at Symantec's site and did not see anything like what you report.

[BigBlue66]

Hey,

Just a hunch here, but if you have MS Office, disable FastFind.

Cheers,

Big Blue 66


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"Right turn Clyde!"

[linstead]

I have just updated to the new Mcafee virus scan engine and found I was having similar problems with mouse and slowdown. The clock would lose time also. I found that reducing the scaning options from all files to program files improved the situation back to where I was before updating Mcafee. If you are using Mcafee this might work for you.

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mike

[ErnieK]

www.pcguide.com/ubb/Forum15/HTML/000579.html (http://www.pcguide.com/ubb/Forum15/HTML/000579.html)

Go the above link (System Troubleshooting) and see similar posts

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Ernie

[rocketwils]

Anything to watch out for when changing the CMOS battery? Anything I need to backup first before doing that? Is the only loss the current clock settings, or does other stuff feed off of the CMOS battery that I need to watch out for?

Thanks!

[rita]

Just wanted to thank all of you for your replies on my problem. Have not had a great deal of time to work on all your suggestions as of yet. I have been unindated with paper work and grades to average. Hopefully, I will soon get a chance to work on some of the problems. I will tell you what I have done and it has made no difference so far.
Run Thorough scan
Run Virus scan
Defrag
Cleaned mouse
cleaned out temp files, etc.
updated zone alarm
updated my eudora mail program
one question I have for Mike. You mention something about McAfee. That is what I use, but I don't know where to go to change the options that you indicated.
I sure hope I don't have a virus. Really don't know how I would have gotten one. Am very careful about updating all my dat files, etc. Actually got one tonight in e-mail and McAfee caught it. BTW, since I last talked with you, the clock has not lost any time. Mouse is still erratic and it takes forever for a program to load. Then everything works for a minute or two. I know it is driving me crazy.

[classicsoftware]

When changing the CMOS Battery, you should go into the bios and write down the information on each screen. There maybe someone who can tell you where you can find a program that will backup your CMOS on a floppy.

[linstead]

To get to settings in Mcafee...........Right Click the Mcafee V Shield Icon in the Task Bar. Point the mouse arrow on the Properties pop up menu. This will bring up a menu with the word System Scan on it. Click on this. This will bring up the System Scan Window (you may need to enter your Mcafee Password here if you selected that option at setup) When in the System Scan window under the heading What To Scan you can select Program Files Only. I hope this will help you Rita. I don't think you have a virus only a conflict with Mcafee trying to scan every file while your computer is trying to do other things.

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mike

[rocketwils]

Thanks everyone for your advise and expertise.

Here's what I did to remedy the problem.

- Experimented with McAfee "All Files" vs. "Program Files". No difference.
- Didn't change the battery.
- Turned OFF Acceleration for the Mouse (Start > Settings > Control Panel > Mouse > Motion). Some improvement in mouse response... less jerky or erratic.
- Since the machine Plug and Play had put both the monitor/graphics and the ethernet/LAN NIC on IRQ11 (the IRQ's are still quite mysterious to me, even after reading this site's good tutorials), I unplugged the NIC and rebooted, then replugged the NIC and rebooted. It still assigned the NIC to IRQ11 (along with the graphics), but it seems to be happy now.

Results: no more time loss on the taskbar clock, no more jerky mouse.

Thanks again for everyone's help. If you have any applied insight into why unseat/reboot/reseat/reboot would have helped, I'd love to know.

John
rocketwils@yahoo.com

[rocketwils]

Guess I spoke too soon. Clock time loss, mouse erratic movement, and occasionally, what I'd call "overly long buffering of keystrokes" came back. what I mean by the keystrokes buffering thing is that the keyboard seems to capture all the strokes, but sometimes the display of those keystrokes hesitates, then comes out in a burst.

So after a few more hours of wild goosechasing, I have another thing I tried that seems to make the PC happy once again.

The tip from the earlier posting about McAfee to change "All Files" to "Program Files" on the scan settings did not make sense to me, because that application is idling until called upon by my daily automatic Virus Scan. But it did set me to thinking and experimenting...

McAfee is actually composed of 2 applications: one is called "VShield", that is composed of the following:
- System scan
- Email scan
- Download scan
- Internet scan.
In parallel to this app is another one called "Virus Scan". This is the one that does the scans you set it up to do, like daily or weekly, or whatever frequency you want.
The problem is VSHIELD IS WORKING ALL THE TIME, IN THE BACKGROUND, potentially stepping in every time any transaction is happening on your machine, like with the harddrive and other components, depending on how you configured it. Lots of apps like Microsoft Word to autosaves of your files in the background. If VShield is simultaneously doing its thing (because it is SO much smarter than we are http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/mad.gif ), it's gonna cause an unexpected extra burden to you as the user... I guess it takes a bunch of computer/CPU 'attention' away from what you're trying to do, like move your mouse around.

Sorry for being such a windbag. The bottom line is: TURN OFF VSHIELD COMPONENTS that you don't need or want, especially "System Scan" which I think is a big culprit. I've now turned VSHIELD completely off (all 4 components), but still have my Virus Scan turned on, and set to "All Files" for the daily scan. My machine is once again happy and so am I http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif

rocketwils

[rita]

Hi everybody,
Thanks for all the responses. Have tried many of them and then some others the past two weeks. It has been a frustating problem. Still don't know what exactly the problem was, but for some reason all seems to be working right now.
Our tech at school said he thought it might be a virus, and he told me some things to do about scanning. I do use McAfee and he said something about setting the heuristics button. Well, I did all that, no virus found. I went online and did two other virus scans and they did not find anything either. After all that, when I rebooted I got a new message that said my defualt mail client was not outlook and that I should make it my default. Naturally, I said no.. That is when my tech thought it was a virus because the Nimda virus acts very similar to what my machine was doing. After that message came up, I also had an error with McAFee and it gave me an error message with the system scan on the VShield. The Vshield was all blue, instaed of blue and red. I finally landed up deleting ALL files from the night I did the online virus scans, uninstalled McAFee and then reinstallled it. So far everything has been working ok. Still don't know if I had a virus or not. don't know if I will ever know the problem.
The part with the McAFee is interesting. If I turn the System Scan off, what happens if a virus invades the system? I thought Vshield had to be enabled in order to catch whatever comes from e-mail and downloads. Would you clarify that for me. Thanks again for all your help. Hope this message made some sense. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

[linstead]

Good news....Mcafee have just withdrawn engine 4150 and gone back to engine 4140. There were a lot of problems caused by 4150 as detailed in these posts. Go and download 4140 fron their website. When you reload 4140 over 4150 you may have to use /f to force it to read from regitery if it comes up with "unable to read registery". Do this by getting the location of the engine exe in the run box and typing /f at the end of line. Include space before /.

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mike