Slowing PC

[CoffeeGuy]

I wish I knew a little more about computers so I could ask an inteliigent question, but I dont. So keep this in mind.

Dell Dimension 8200
Year of purchase 2002
XP Home
Pentium 1.9 Ghz
256 Ram
80 Gig HD
DVD/CD R-W (self installed - one year ago)

This PC is not used to it's full potential. It's just a toy for me. Internet, messaging, finance, dvd & cd ripping and burning. Some word processing. This past week it has started running painfully slow, like ice cold molasses. There are no detected viruses, via AVG. Also using spybot search and destroy. It does show some there, 8 that could not be removed. but those 8 have been there for a long time. At least 6 months. I also use Stinger for certain virus searches. I apear to be virus free. What could be causing the speed to be dropping so much ? Before this, I could back up a dvd on Shrink 3.2 in around 3 to 4 hours. Now it's more like 200 hours. The only thing that I can think of that may have had something to do with the drop in speed is upgrading to Netzero's high speed. After downloading the web accelerator and installing, I noticed a huge drop in PC speed. No increase in web speed at all. And a huge drop in over all PC speed. I then uninstalled the web accelerator. But nothing changed. I went through the virus checks and spybots again. Performed the defrag operation. That didn't change a thing. Still incredably slow. I tried to perform a system restore. But got the message that I could not do this. And was given no explanation why. System restore went through the motions, took about 12 minutes. Then displayed the message, can not restore to this date. I tried several dates. From three days to three months. I haven't called Netzero, because a.) This would be hard for me to prove Netzero's web accelerator had anything to do with the loss of speed. And b.) Whenever I call, I always get a tech who can not speak a lick of english. Or at least I cant understand the dialect. Any help here would be greatly appreciated. And try to keep it at a level I might be able to understand. Like fifth or sixth grade level. Ha !

[Soopafresh]

Start your system in safe mode by pressing F8 right before Windows starts and run Spybot in Safe Mode. That will get rid of the Spyware it couldn't remove before. Google "XP Safe Mode" if you need more help on how to start your PC in that mode.

256MB of RAM is too small for XP. It just is. RAM is cheap these days. You need at least 512MB for XP to run with any gusto.

[808smokey]

turn off all the fancy crap that XP uses for the graphics.

right click my computer
- properties
- advanced tab
- performance
- select "adjust for best performance"

that will speed it up a little bit for ya

[redwudz]

What Soopafresh said, and make sure you download the latest versions of Spybot and your antivirus while in Safe Mode. Some of the trojans disable your antivirus/antitrojan programs and disable updates.

[CoffeeGuy]

I did as Soopafresh instructed, but still got the same message. Tried three times in safe mode. But, I was able to do the system restore in safe mode and everything is back to normal. Actually, better than normal. Way better than normal. I appreciate your help on this. Many thanks.

[thecoalman]

FYI that web acceleration software is a joke. For a site such as this that is text based mostly it's not going to do much. For the most part it works by having the ISP compress images even further than they already are. Most webmasters building site will have already done this, the result is that it destroys the image quality. Here's an example from AOL. Just another one of my pet peeves..... If anything they should be paying you to use it because in the long run it's saving them money due to the reduced bandwidth.

If I remember correctly the original image on the top was 190px X 50px, 2.5K which is releatively small for an image of that size in .gif format. The bottomn image is how it looks after AOL get s done with it.

[Xylob the Destroyer]

you defrag you drive lately?
ran the disk cleanup?
cleaned your registry?
defragged your page file?

[Uncle Sammy]

Hey Coffee, I had the same problem with my dell dimension just a short time ago, it was so slow I wanted to shoot it.
After upgrading the RAM to 512, it was unbelievable how the performance picked up!!

[CoffeeGuy]

How is ram installed ? Just plug'um in ?

[Uncle Sammy]

Yeah RAMs probably the simplest upgrade, if you buy a 2nd 256 ram board, you would just plug it in the slot behind the first. If you buy a 512 ram board, you would just remove the 256 and replace with the 512. You wouldnt be able to use the 256 & 512 together unfortunately.

[Soopafresh]

RAM is the biggest performance enhancer for the $. Once you're cruising along with 512MB RAM, you'll ask yourself why you didn't upgrade years ago.

[Gritz]

If it just started recently then you probably do have malware running in the background. A lot. Get a copy of AD AWARE PERSONAL (free from Lavasoft) and download the latest definitions and run a full system scan and remove all the junk. You need to get rid of the 8 that Spybot failed to remove. I suspect hundreds of instances.

Find msconfig.exe (in the system or system32 folder I think) and run it, then click on the Startup tab and uncheck all the crapola running in the background that you can't identify positively that you need (you can always recheck it if you really do need it).

Run Hijack which will give you some hints ... but be careful what you delete. I would make a backup copy of the Registry first (System Tools/Restore).

Yes .... 256 MB is way too little. Defrag too ..... I use Diskeeper but XP will do it ok.

If you installed the CDROM you might want to make sure DMA is checked. Normally ... it would be. Device Manager, IDE, Secondary Channel. (Windows/Break for System Properties)

This will give you some starting points.

[CoffeeGuy]

So do all you have 512 mb of ram ? More ? Is the price low enough to purchase from a retailer or would you go mail order ?

Gritz - How much of that so called crapolla be takenn off ? What needs to stay ?

[handyguy]

After you boot your computer you can see how much free memory it has.

Content Indexing should be turned off. This is something that can slow your computer down & they say so too...its one of those XP file searching things you don't need.

You can also change the role of your computer (some) to Network server, varooooommmmmmm.....!!

[redwudz]

CoffeeGuy, 512MB is good. I run 1024MB, but I have seen little difference from when I used 512MB. When I have worked on systems with as little as 128MB running XP, there is a major improvement when increasing RAM. 256MB is sufficient for web surfing and word processing, but encoding and video operations demand a lot from a computer. RAM is cheap enough now that 512MB is the cheapest effective upgrade available.

EDIT: I would also install a second harddrive, which should give you as much improvement in throughput as the increased RAM as far as video operations go.

[Gritz]

Coffee Guy,
In msconfig.exe if you look at the Command column you can probably get an idea of what it is, by where it's located. Things like "Microsoft Office", "Quicken Startup", "Billminder", "Acrobat Assistant", "UpdReg", "qttask", "iTunesHelper", are some that just eat up resources by being "quicker to load". (They say) You don't need them .... but the program developer would like you to put them where you can constantly be reminded that you have them, kind of like advertising I guess. And you can go from there to experiment. Anything connected with a printer, leave there. Also any anti-virus, pop-up software .... leave. If you make a mistake ... you can always go back and put the checkmark back on.

But the biggest slowdown comes from mal-ware, or adware. I would run a scan at least the first of every month. Ad-Aware works best rooting out junk ... although I have Spysweeper running all the time since it runs in the background.

[handyguy]

Shrink has a couple of settings for low priority mode. If these are on, it takes a lot longer to do.