Windows running very slowly

[andyav]

Hi,
just wondering if anyone could help me out with a problem.
I purchased my computer only four months ago, it's got an Intel Celeron CPU 2.6 GHz, is made by Packard Bell and runs XP.

Initially it ran at a good speed, but of late it has slowed down remarkably. I have removed all unnecessary software, run spyware checks and antivirus checks, but they have shown up nothing.

One strange occurence is that whenever I try to defragment the hard drive, it never goes beyond one percent complete and doesn't go any further. The analyse function that you perform beforehand says that it doesn't need defragmenting, even though I haven't been able to do it since I have had it.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
Thank you

[sdkfz]

check tht your cpu fan is not clogged/stopped and the heatsink is firmly attached. I had the cpu retention clip fail on my old P4, the cpu clocked down to a speed that would not fry the chip thus slowing down everything to a crawl. Once I crazy glued the plastic back together and reinstalled the heatsink/fan we were back to expected speed. I am now on several months with this fix -I did manage to find the plastic retention parts but I am waiting for the fix to fail before going back in.

On the other hand if this is not the reason, degrag in safe mode- any hard drive activity even a screen saver will stop the defrag process.

How full is the drive? If the drive is alsmost full you have no space for a swap file and this can slow things down.

Have a look at the storage set for XP system restore points and internet files, clock them back to a smaller amount especially the internet files and even more so if you are on broadband - no need to cache pages if he download speed is fast.

What do you have running, check out msconfig from the run command - is the system running a whole bunch of stuff in hopes that you use them? same thing for the system tray - get rid of the extra programs. Sure it takes a few seconds more to load the program when you actually need to use it, but if everything is slowed down becasue it is running in the back ground then the savings of a few load up seconds is offset by the sluggish system all the time.

How much ram do you have? this alone might be the cause, with XP 256 is minimal and 512 is much better. Yes XP 'can' run on the MS min of 64, but you'd better be a patient person. If your hard drive is a low speed and cache (5400 2mb) hard drive then any extra use of the drive as cache by XP becasue of low RAM is only excaberating the slowness.

Hope some of this helps

[bailey]

and don't have a virus program running all the time checking every file, that will slow everything down a lot too.