Slow computer

vinylmusic

I have a P4 266Ghz with 80Gb hard drive
I upped the memory to 1GB
I've defragmented the hard drive, ran Ccleaner a few times, usual virus checks and still find the computer running slow.

Can anyone advise other programs(preferably free) or tests to find out whats causing this?

Any advice would be appreciated

f1charlie

Find out which process is taking up your CPU time by using the inbuilt system monitoring tool:

http://www.gla.ac.uk:443/cert/guides/processes_xp.shtml

Or install ProcessExplorer (free) which is a bit more comprehensive:

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/ProcessExplorer.html

Then come back if you are still stuck!

EDIT
Have you run Adaware and Spybot?

Charlie

sheedatali

There are number of things that can be making your system slow, you have to describe, what is it doing exactly, is it slow during boot time, is it slow when you are using your computer and running applications etc.

May be your hard drive is slow? Having more memory does not always increase your system speed. What is the speed of memory ? and what is your System Bus speed?

In general i normaly do a cycle of these,

1) Run CCleaner for both (Free Temp Space + Fix App Problems) << it free http://www.ccleaner.com/

2) Run SpyBot << It is free


3) Run Ad-Aware << Standard Edition is free

4) Run my Anti-Virus << Avast Home << Its free

5) Defragment My drives

And i never had any problem with my system. Last time installed XP in Septemeber 2004, still working fine and i am a very heavy user.


Another thing which circles around is the Prefetch cache feature of XP. But before i can tell about it i need more information on where are you having problem, Boot or Running Application ?

And Charlie is right, ProcessExplorer helped me in getting rid of a problem i was having for some time. During logon my system was using CPU 100% for 60 to 75 seconds for no reason i could find. Evantualy i used this to find that Windows Update Client was actually causing this, so i just disabled that service, although i take the responsibility now to check updates on regualr basis

alared

Run Hijackthis and find what crap is on your PC

cwoodham

There are quite a few threads on this forum on this. Try a search. Go to Search this Forum, Advanced search, Search by Keyword and type slow in the box, Below it select Search titles only.

Ive just tried it and it comes up with quite a few useful threads which might help.

going2die_rich

Running a new version of Norton? I found that really slowed my pc down, especially having Norton Ghost on it. Removed Norton altogether and it was back to running quick.

Blacksheep1979

If you have a lot of stuff on your desktop windows will cache all of these and make your computer run slower.