Computer S L O W - Help Please

NiftyDigits

mercman1969 wrote: »

Appreciate that i am running something from the Stone Age by still using a Windows XP computer...

Trouble is its recently taking nearly 8 minutes to boot up and then when it does it is taking an age to open up either Outlook or Firefox.......

It keeps giving me a white box and 'unresponsive' message

Would greatly appreciate members help to try and recover it please if possible

How are you getting along? Have you backed up your data and emails?
Make more than one kind of backup if there is enough space on the external.
Make at least one using the XP Files and Settings Transfer Wizard

poppellerant

The first thing that stands out to me is the speed of the harddrive. With those speeds, I'd be weary about turning the computer off in case I couldn't get back into Windows again!

The second thing I notice, is that the Interface CRC Error Count - this could be the reason why you're getting slow speeds. Otherwise the drive doesn't have any reallocated sectors, or any pending - this says to me that the surface of the harddrive is trustworthy, shown by your surface scan. The interface CRC errors mean you might have a loose cable or one which is failing.

Of course it could be your motherboard. You say it's an old computer, so perhaps it's lost the BIOS settings and defaulted the IDE transfer mode to something like PIO 0, which maximum transfer rate happens to be roughly the transfer rates of your harddrive. It may well be a dodgy IDE cable making the system default to the slowest IDE transfer mode - for the sake of a pound or two, I'd buy a new 80-pin one from eBay. This cable should see you right, but don't be tempted to buy a second hand cable.

In terms of backup, I would get a USB stick ready - I've no idea how much data you have, but an 8 GB stick is usually enough for most backups. You need to grab a notepad and write down what you need, have a look on your desktop, the start menu and see if you need any data for those programs keeping. For example you might see Samsung Kiess for a mobile phone, are the photos for this backed up? Or the Internet Explorer icon might remind you that you have important bookmarks that you can't afford to lose.

As a basic rule, these are what I'd backup:

• My Documents
• My Music
• My Pictures
• Downloads folder
• Internet Explorer and/or Firefox favourites
• Emails from programs such as Outlook Express or Windows Live Mail
• Device drivers for stuff like printers, graphic card, sound card, scanner, etc

Of course that list isn't by any means comprehensive and your mileage is bound to vary.