Help poor performance on PC

ketherin

I have a Dell 2400 PC for home, and its mainly used for a few spreadsheets/e-mails and surfing the web I'm on BT broadband. (windows XP)

Things have been fine for a long while until last week. I havent installed any new software or made any changes but now its running so slow, it takes forever just to bring up an internet browser or excel etc.

I'm upto date on virus & spybot etc and run them every week or so.

I have Spybot, anti virus, cwshredder and nothing finds any viruses or trojans etc

Any ideas or help pleaseeeeeeeee

James240

Perhaps The harddrive needs to be defraged? possible cause of it slowing down .........

Donnie

Yes, try that first. Disconnect from the internet, shut down all the processes that you can by 'right clicking' on the icons in the bottom right hand corner and then selecting 'exit' or 'close'.. Then run Scandisk.
If no problems are found, run the Disc Defragmenter(overnight is best). Then restart the computer.
Which Firewall do you use?

Rave

One thing that can cause a really drastic slowdown is if the hard disk stops running in UDMA mode. Go to control panel -> system -> device manager -> hard disks (I think) -> primary IDE channel -> properties. It should say 'current transfer mode: UDMA mode5' or similar. If it says 'PIO mode', uninstall the device (don't worry, this is safe) and reboot the computer. Windows will redetect it and it should go back to UDMA mode.

ketherin

I'm running McAfee Security Center, which has McAfee Personal Firewall plus-build 6.1.6144.

When I go to control panel -> system -> device manager ->
there's no hard disks tab ? looked under properties of disk drives and get 4 tabs (general,policies,volumes,driver but no mention of current transfer mode in any of them ? )

Thansk for the advise,
I'm running a disk check now then i'll start the de-frag.

Any other ideas please send them my way....

peter_the_piper

Also have you cleaned out the temp folder in outlook or firefox. I suggest you also get a dowload of Ccleaner which gets rid of old files and debris left when uninstalling programs.Also Ad-Aware and microsoft Anti spyware are useful as each often find things the other misses. Windows defrag is adequate at best, worth downloading a trial of O&O defragmenter as its much better imho.

rizla01

Also worth clicking on Control - Alt - Delete ONCE all at the same time to see what is running in the background. Ccome back and tell us what is running.

You can safely delete all but 'explorer' and 'systray'.

This will free up any ram that is gobbled up by programs that begin on start-up Mainly Unnecessary. One of the ones to keep will be your spyware prog.

Riz

Toxteth_OGrady

@Riz

Your last advice

You can safely delete all but 'explorer' and 'systray'

is only valid for W98. OP has XP.

:cool:

TOG

rizla01

Toxteth_OGrady wrote:

@Riz

Your last advice is only valid for W98. OP has XP.

:cool:

TOG

Aha. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing!:):):)

I know very little about XP

I stand corrected but it would still be worth reporting what is running, though wouldn't it.

Toxteth_OGrady

Indeed.

:cool:

TOG

Toxteth_OGrady

Any other ideas please send them my way....

Try scanning your system at https://www.pcpitstop.com

:cool:

TOG