Hello, I am new here, but I have no where else to go. I am hoping somewhere on here there is someone who can point me in the right direction with the information I can provide. I have been trying to help my brother with his computer lately, as I have a good grasp on the concept. (I'm no expert, but it all makes sense to me) He said he has been having issues with lag, his computer lags REALLY bad when he gives it a task as simple as opening the Start menu....

All I know about the computer is:
2.27GHZ Duo Core Processor
4GB RAM
500GB HDD
I'm not sure on the Graphics Card (I was to lazy to look)
I don't know What the Mother board is either
OS: Windows Vistax64 SP: 1

The first thing I did, was checked Task Manager to find out what is eating up the resources and all I saw was "System" running a process at 75-99% of the CPU the description is "NT Kernel & System". He hasn't downloaded anything new, he hasn't updated anything recently and the problem JUST started yesterday. He was playing a game on his computer (It's been there for a while) shuts his cpu down, then turns it on a few hours later and suddenly it is lagging unbelievably! I disabled indexing, I turned off superfetching and prefetching. I made sure hyper threading was enabled. I disabled all startup items and unfortunately I wasn't able to get any results. I started in safe boot and oddly enough, it was actually running steadily at 99% the entire time. Temperatures look normal, all operating conditions seems to be perfectly normal. I reseated the RAM just to be sure, I dusted off the inside of his tower, and lastly I ran a software called Process Explorer hoping it would give me a better rundown...it didn't. It just says that a process called system is running at 75-90% and system idle is running at 15-25%.





These are two pictures, the first one is the program called Process Explorer, the second is Task Manager in safe mode....ANY tips are greatly appreciated, and if you need any more information feel free to ask.

Well, sort of heheh...My brother rarely uses his computer, so when there is an update he ignores it...which gets me to 2. Now that he is having issues, the first thing I said was, check for and run any updates. Sadly though they do not seem to download and I fear it may be due to this issue. I had him start updating, (32 important updates, 24 after getting rid of MS Office updates and stuff like that) and after about 3 hours it was still at 0kb received and 0%. When I started trying to figure things out, I attempted to update while in safe mode...we got the same thing. They just don't appear to be downloading. :/

Ok, can I ask what that does? I'm not familiar with sfc. Also what would I be looking for? Will it give specifics of what it scans or a status/report at the end?

*EDIT*
I see a brief DOS Prompt window, then it goes away, it is only there for a split second... Is that expected? Is something running in the background?

Oh, wow! Thanks, I've never seen this, it's a VERY neat tool. It's running now. I must say, it's gonna be a while, it's at 1% and holding there...I'll report back ASAP! Thanks again!

*sorry for the double post*

Ok, so I've run "sfc /scannow" 3 times, and all three times it found 1 error, and it was unable to repair that one error.

I ran a registry scanner to see if there are any bad registry's...I'm sad to admit that I didn't do this sooner. It found 7,358 registry errors, repairing those now. I'm not sure if this will fix the issue, but it's at 4,000 of 7,358 repaired and the fans have stopped running so loudly, and the CPU is holding steady at 50-60%. That's still not good, but the computer is much more responsive and seems to be doing 'better'. "I'll try the updates after this finishes.

Does it sound like this could have been a registry problem, and should I be concerned with that error that was unrepairable by sfc /scannow?