- By Dan Veaner
- Business & Technology
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Dr. Digit 'Splains It AllDr. Digit 'Splains It AllA few weeks ago my computer slowed down to a crawl. When it tried to access a network drive it would take 30 seconds. Then it was fine for a minute. Then another 30 second delay. 30 seconds doesn't seem like a lot of time until you have to sit through it multiple times in a day. If I work here for eight hours you're talking 320 times, or a total of more than two and a half hours. We keep just about everything on our network drive including pictures and articles for this publication and any number of things that we need to put out a weekly newspaper.
So I set out to figure out what was wrong.
First I suspected the network drive. But I noticed that our other computers didn't have any problem with it. I tried three different computers, all of which accessed that drive faster than a speeding bullet. Well, maybe not that fast, but pretty fast. A colleague suggested heat in my computer might be a problem. I thought that was plausible, because the fan has been going in my computer for over a year -- it's gotten loud, but I'm not sure which one because there are three. I couldn't figure out a great way to test the heat theory until another colleague suggested booting it from a Ubuntu CD and then trying to access the drive.
That was a brilliant idea, because all the hardware would be the same. Only the software would be different. If it didn't work it would be a hardware problem. If it did work it would be a Windows problem. Ubuntu is a flavor of Linux that has the unique ability to be loaded from a CD without actually installing it onto your computer. The idea is that you can check it out and then if you like it you install it. So I stuck the Ubuntu CD (you can download it from the Internet) into my drive and rebooted.
Loading an operating system from a CD can be slow, because CDs aren't the fastest medium. But once it loaded I was able to access my network drive... without the delay.
The good news: it wasn't my hardware. That computer may be loud, but it is cool enough. The bad news: it was something in my Windows configuration.
So I booted Windows in Safe Mode. Safe Mode just loads basic Windows without all the junk you have accumulated over the years. Again it accessed my network drive without problems. But the thing is that in Safe Mode you are supposed to fix whatever is messing up Windows in normal mode, and to do that you have to know what it is. I used a utility to see which services and drivers Windows was loading whenever I started it. The list came to 18 pages, single spaced!
I decided to take a Draconian approach. Using the MSConfig utility I disabled all of the drivers. That did not fix the problem.
I enabled those and disabled all my startup utilities, the programs Windows loads, some of which end up in the system tray, some of which run in the background, some of which just run. Voila! The problem went away!
But that list was pretty long, too -- Windows loads a lot more than you think because all these programs load things to make them seem better. I found programs for a camera I don't use were loading, some from iTunes, all kinds of things.
So I randomly disabled small groups, and finally found that my backup program -- the one I use to back up my data that isn't on the network drive -- was loading at startup and was causing the problem. In fact it was so bad that the backup program didn't even work very well because of the problems it was causing itself!
Nothing was wrong with this program until something was. I have no explanation for what turned it into a Windows destroyer. I regularly scan for viruses and the machine is not infected. I used a number of diagnostic problems, none of which were helpful in this situation. The program just went bad for some reason. Ironically it was the backup program that came bundled with my network drive!
I am fairly technically savvy, but this was hard. It took more than two weeks to finally resolve the problem, and that after consulting colleagues for ideas. meanwhile I lost a ton of time to the delays, not to mention the time spent tracking down the problem. I was very close to wiping my hard drive clean and reinstalling Windows, which would have taken even more time away.
It shouldn't be this hard to identify Windows problems. The OS should come with a diagnostic program. When drive access is a problem it should be able to trace all the processes that are accessing drives to at least narrow it down that way. While it wasn't Microsoft that created the offending program, it is Microsoft that created the situation in which is was almost impossible to identify it.
Once it was identified the solution was easy. I don't use that backup program any more.
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