Slow Windows XP solution?
 

Is there a reasonable solution to recapturing the normal operating speed of a Windows XP computer? (Please don’t tell me to buy him an Apple.)

My son brought me his Dell Inspiron / b130 laptop which had reached a p a i n f u l l y sloooow pace. I started by deleting programs, temp files, defragmenting, upgrading software, and anything else I could think of. I foolishly purchased Norton antivirus and Norton Confidential from Costco. (What a waste of money.) The computer has responded somewhat to all these efforts, but still responds much too slowly.

I’ve tried a few online software downloads (spybot and registry cleaner and maybe one or two others – I’ve been working on this off and on for two weeks) without success. I’m reluctant to spend more money on something that may or may not work. Do I have to find a local computer repair place?

I've seen bad HD's that will cause a computer to slow. The B130 should have 512 RAM default, so this should be OK. Right click My Computer -> Manage -> Event Viewer. Look at the application and system logs and see if you see any errors...

Dave

Try downloading this util from Hitachi. It will test the HD.
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm#DFT

Uninstall Norton and install FreeAvg.

http://free.grisoft.com/

I would get that at some point there has been spyware/malware on the machine, and it is either directly chewing up CPU time, or it has replaced .dll files with their versions.

An reinstallation will typically help. No need to flatten the machine, just reinstall right over the top so you keep your software and files.

I agree with slodave. A jacked up harddrive can cause poor response times.

A bad stick of memory can also lead to hard to diagnose problems.

You can use memtest to diagnose bad memory.

http://www.memtest.org/

Is there any programs on it that you absolutely must save? or dont have copies of? Best way to clean it, (barring a HD failure) is to reinstall XP. it will will wipe everything clean. Ive done it to two PCs recently that i got used for my kids that the owners got so frustrated with that they bought new ones, and now they run great.

Many times a PC's 'slow down' is caused by programs running in the background that, that you dont even know about. You can disable these on start up buy changing your MSCONFIG. Its very simple to do and you can disable them from running and tying up system resources. This will also make your PC faster on start up since it doesnt have as many programs to start up.

Heres is a site to get you started if you want. Just remember one rule - when in doubt, leave it on.
http://www.netsquirrel.com/msconfig/msconfig_xp.html

I'm with Snake. Back up anything necessary. Format, re-load.

Found a very nice defrag program recently. Auslogics Disk Defrag, that is a free download and works much better than the Windoz version.

www.download.com has it and its unlimited in its useage.

It will also find junk files and delete your recycle bin to boot so does a lot more than the built in version.

Like a couple of others above, every 6-9 months I format and reload everything from a drive image of the computers hard drive that I keep at the house. That is really the fastest way to get the system back up to speed.

Edit, if you really want the laptop to run and boot faster, get a 7200 rpm hard drive and install it. Did this with a Dell that I had used for years and was amazed at the difference. it normally booted in about a minute and the faster drive cut this time in half for bootup and every other operation was much faster as well. This usually costs around $100 or so and is well worth doing if you are going to keep the laptop.

In my experience, Windows needs to be wiped and reinstalled every so often...

So, back up your data, make sure you have install discs for software, wipe the drive and reinstall...

and norton is a resource hog...

Is FreeAvg going to cover me when I uninstall Nortons?

google AVG Rootkit... perhaps there is a rootkit virus on his PC that normal antivirus programs can't find.

The AVG rootkit program found two viruses that Trend Micro couldn't see.

something similar happened with our PC. It's some sort of a Dell super XEON quad with tons of RAM and the entire computer is new (it's 3 years old but Dell replaced every single board last year).

Was running Win2000 and very fast as you would expect. We upgraded to XP and it is dog slow. Even worse, upgraded to MSAccess 2007 to better run our custom sales and production app, and that thing went from speedy to continental drift slow.