This one's got me stumped. Computer crawling/NIC problem.

KyanWan

KyanWan

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Sep 4, 2008
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We've got a ton of people out there - here's a mystery for you.

Athlon 64 FX55 / Asus A8N-E / 1GB / Running XP

The system *crawls* - it takes 5 minutes to start Firefox, Explorer, even Notepad.

If I unplug the LAN cord - it works great. Firefox starts instantly, Photoshop, and even notepad (lol). I can't figure it out for the life of me.

Previously, I narrowed the problem to a "fautly" NIC driver. re-Installed the Nvidia network driver - and it cleaned it up. Worked beautiful for about 2 weeks. Also did an in-place install of XP for good measure ( that - barely did anything - It's a pretty clean system.)

Couple weeks later *BAM* same problem. Tried to replace the nic - DOH - I get what I deserve for stopping by Best Buy for a quick repair part ( a joke, and a trip back to best buy to return a garbage part. Ordered 2 Intel PRO 1Gbit cards from Newegg - going to try those on Thursday or Friday hopefully. )

I've already hunted for the usual suspects -

- A Nod32 manual scan on full-power (heuristic deep search on *all* drives *all* files) located nothing.
- AdAware & Spybot find nothing.

My guesses -

- Faulty on-board NIC chip (disable & replace. Note - when I disable/unplug the NIC the thing works like a charm.)
- Faulty motherboard / CPU / RAM ( Somewhat unlikely, because the thing works great besides the NIC ... but you never know - unless a thorough test is done )
- Some unknown malware ( hmm ... maybe - after all - it does start faulting when the NIC is on. )
- Possibly a configuration problem where a non-existent computer is trying to be reached on the LAN/NET & not timing out properly (?? Very odd and unusual ... but it's possible. )

As for the Malware part - I enabled logging on my router - and I was unable to locate *any* suspect outgoing data streams. ( I did this on a Snapgear - it misses nothing - I found no suspect connections. )

I did try to hunt out any rouge LAN connections, and found none as well. (except for an attempt to connect to a long-gone LAN printer that I had ... I killed it. Didn't really make any changes.)

So, any ideas? ;)

[ Last note - If the NIC replacement fails - I will probably get to pick up a new system to replace this one (like a 95% chance rofl) ... so, no loss. If it is fixed or fails - I win either way :D - It's just this problem is driving me insane - that I can't figure it out & get it fixed up. ]
 
Odd, I've never heard of this. I'll let someone else with more experience try, lol.

Odd that it runs fine with the network cord unplugged.

~Gooda~
 
Get a linux CD and boot from the CD..... If you have the same problem with linux it's hardware.... if not.... it's drivers/software.
 
Have you checked the"device manager for any exclamation marks? It looks like the NIC has a conflict with another device. Check the NIC in the device manager (obvious when you have the problem), and it should tell you wether it has a conflict with something else. From waht you are telling me, you have a conflict with you NIC and something else.

GL

MenOpaws
 
Yeah - pulling the network cord is like a magic bullet for this problem. *click* and it runs nice within a second.

2 different NICs have no conflicts in device manager. I'm going to give a higher quality NIC a shot - rather than a store-bought one.

Booting from Linux CD is a great idea - never thought of that.

I'm giving that a shot before the system officially gets the axe.

[edit]

One thing I should mention about this system too - A8N boards have a fan that's notorious for failure. This one, failed (as many of them do.) There was a period of about 1 week where the chipset was running hot. The cooler/fan was replaced to fix the problem.

The Nforce4 may have had its life cut short in the process (overheating for a week straight ... on a system that's on 24/7 - lol) The NIC is part of the onboard devices & chipset package, after all.

I had another one of these where I pulled the faulty fan out before it failed. That one still runs fine - and it's the exact same specs as this one.
 
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- Safe mode did not have problems. ( DOH! Forgot to try it. )
- Slax booted, worked very nicely. ( And it was pretty cool too. )
- 2X Intel PRO 100's - same thing. Plug it in, system lags.

Now to me - it's looking like there's something there in the plumbing somewhere that's killing this system. I gave it another shot trying to hunt down ANYTHING that could be slowing this beast down - nothing. Looks like it's going to take longer to diagnose & fix than it would to reinstall everything ( like - a whole weekend for that - and all the software on the system. ) I give up. !bang Since it seems that the hardware's good - it's getting a format on Saturday. And I'll see what happens then.
 
KyanWan: I think you may be infected with a malware or a virus or your TCP/IP stack is corrupt. We can try to reset your TCP/IP stack first to see if that fixes it.

Run this from command prompt as administrator. Don't run this in safe mode. More information on this here -> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/299357

netsh int ip reset c:resetlog.txt
Click to expand...


Keep the resetlog.txt just in case the problem is still not fixed. May need this later.

If you are positive you are free from viruses malware spyware rootkits etc, we can run the windows SFC (System File Checker) to check the integrity of all windows files without completely reinstalling the OS (if not, let me know and we'll find a way to clean up your system). You will need the original OS install CD for this. More information here -> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310747
 
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