Weird pauses during file copy, memory-related blue screens, high temperature, weird delays, MASSIVELY long boot up, weird noises during audio playback…it just paints a very clear picture. My (remote) diagnosis is, that you’re dealing with some form of hardware issue. The hardware you’re using is quite old and is not known for being very efficient – in fact, the Pentium IV ranks among the worst processors in history since it produced a lot of heat while not being particularly fast at the same time; it wasn’t a power-efficient processor and the performance/energy ratio was horrible. Now if memory serves me right, I bought my first P4 between 2003 and 2005, which would make your PC roughly 6 to 9 years old. And that means that a thermally unfriendly CPU ran for 6 to 9 years on your motherboard, which takes its toll on hardware. It may be a lot of hardware components that suffered from exposure, such as the CPUs internal L1/L2/L3 cache. You may also be dealing with defective RAM modules or problems with your motherboard.

At this point, all our investigation into these issues will likely not help. You have done basically ALL you could ever do. I suggest not to invest any more time in finding the issue and solving it – because you won’t. Even if I had the PC here in my office for a couple of days, I don’t think I would find the issue.

Now here is my first advice: Start clean! That’s right. Perform a fresh install of Windows XP SP3 and install ONLY the programs you absolutely need on it. Observe your system for a couple of days or weeks. If these symptoms keep occuring right out of the gate, then you have no choice other than to buy a new PC (even a 200-300$ desktop would be x-times more efficient and faster than your current rig) or suffer from the low performance due to a hardware defect.

Now addressing my optimization methodology technique:
1. Defragmentation
2. Disk Cleanup
3. Disk Optimizer
4. Virus Scanning
5. Registry Scanning and Clean Up {Scanned Items: 6421426, Problems: 2468}
6. Registry Defragmentation And Optimization
7. CCleaner
8. Performance And Maintenance Utilities
9. Bugs And Errors Fixing Tools
10. System Monitoring And Analyzing Equipment Softwares
11. MalwareBytes AntiMalware
12. Program And Task Management Optimization

Summary
I have followed your link and recognized the page instantly as i have read it before when i was doing my research and believe me i have done all of the solutions and the steps plus adding a lot of other methods and techniques as well. As far as your possible causes are concerned, allow me to give you my updated response or feedback which is:

1. My start up programs only load basic services as i have blocked all the programs that automatically run at start up, so that issue was already done.
2. Insufficient RAM; less probability.
3. Bad Fragmentation; not likely.
4. Only one antivirus program has always been running. {I just installed 6 different kinds of antivirus softwares for testing and experimentation and i used to install them one at a time and now all of them are uninstalled except one which is bitdefender antivirus pro 2011}
5. HDD Space is not an issue as i have still got 600 GB of free space out of my 2 terabyte SATA HDD and the virtual memory paging file size storage allocation protocols is also managed by the system and is plenty.
6. Slow internet speed again is not an issue as i have a 50 MBPS VDSL Broadband Service.
7. There are no hardware or software conflicts.
8. Windows is fully updated and automatic updates are fully enabled.
9. Processor temperature is nominal but sometimes it overheats while the rest of the hardware temperature is fine. {Testing was done by using “Speed Fan”.}
10. Memory is not an issue as the software and hardware has been upgraded to the maximal supported RAM on the motherboard and the system which is 4 GB.
11. Last but not the least the only thing i haven’t tried yet is the manual update of my system drivers although my windows programs and system drivers are technically fully updated but i still need to test my statement.

Finally I would like to thank you once again for your initiative and absolutely and definitely I would keep you informed of my results and update you further as i do my research experimentation. Farewell.

first of all: this has to be one of the the most dedicated comment on this blog to date and I appreciate this. You’ve put a lot of thoughts into your questions and theories and we’ve also put a lot of energy into this, so I salute you for that.

But let’s get into your questions and theories one by one:

1. Software limitations: There is no actual limitations (either set by the hardware or software). So Windows does not have a set limit (e.g. 1024 applications is the maximum). The registry itself will also not increase massively with hundreds of programs installed; say for example your registry is 60 MB in size. If you install a program, it might just grow by about a couple of KB. However, there are applications that might have a bug and increase the registry size massively (however, that’s quite rare).

2. Security Solutions: As we’ve proven in other blog posts, security solutions have the tendency to slow things down a bit – and even more so if you use several security suites at a time (which you seem to be doing from what I read). How about you try to temporarily get rid of ALL the security solutions; try to start your torrent application (I know you’re offline but the torrent client should start its memory leak anyways, right?). Does it happen again? If not, install your security suite and see if it happens.

3. When Windows performs slow and there is no program causing any issues, you might be looking at DRIVER problems. Actually, this is a highly likely scenario. Windows Task Manager does not convey driver memory leaks or excessive resource utilization. What I would do in your case is simple: go through device manager – step by step – and update your chipset driver (e.g. Intel, AMD, nVidia etc.), your graphics, your sound chip, your Wi-Fi, your LAN….anything that’s updateable. That will take you a couple of hours of figuring out where to find the drivers, but I honestly have a feeling that this will solve your problems.

4. Processes running in Task-Manager: I wish I had shown the number of processes before/after installing these processes. But it was somewhere around the 140-160 area AFTER installing and around the 50-60 area BEFORE installing these programs.

5. Restoring performance? We showed in subsequent parts how performance was increased and what effect our optimization steps had: http://blog.tune-up.com/windows-insights/performance-check-how-200-new-programs-slow-down-your-pc-part-2/ and http://blog.tune-up.com/windows-insights/windows-insights/performance-check-how-200-new-programs-slow-down-your-pc-part-3/. Uninstalling or just disabling these processes, wouldn’t nullify the impact, because there is a lot more going on that just startup processes and services. Think Scheduled Tasks, Fragmentation, registry errors (that may cause performance issues) etc. It’s only if you really clean up is that you get close to original performance.

6. Using software WITHOUT impact: You see, internally at TuneUp we have asked ourselves the EXACT question you had. In short, is there a way to run software without its impact. This is why we came up with TuneUp Program Deactivator, which is part of our 2011 and 2012 version of TuneUp Utilities. It temporarily turns off processes, services and scheduled tasks of programs you don’t need at the moment. When you launch them, it re-enables them. You close them, it closes them down again. I have written a massive whitepaper for TuneUp that shows this impact: http://download.tuneup.de/company/press/en/tuneup_utilities_2012_whitepaper.pdf (see page 5).

7. Hardware Upgrade? Well, if ALL the steps I suggested won’t help, another 2 or 4 Gigs of memory may improve performance a bit. But it certainly wouldn’t stop the memory leak – the process would just grow to whatever new size of RAM you have (which would be a shame).

Let’s see if I could help you Let me know.

Best,
Sandro Villinger
Editor in Chief, TuneUp Blog