Damn Computers

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Hi all

I have been having a few problems with the Main PC at home since I upgraded to XP, mainly the fact that it was so slow to boot and run applications. I thought it might have been a duff build as I was in a hurry when I did it. So I decided to re-build......again, however it has not helped at all, the machine takes ages way to long to boot, it seems normal until it loads the desktop screen then it just seems to slow down incredibly, it takes about 10- 15 secs just to bring up google when you click on IE, I thought the hard drive might be on it's way out (can't hear any strange noises from it) so I ran Spinrite on it over night, by this morning it had done 70 odd % but had not found anything wrong with the drive so far. this is a basic install, only got XP Pro installed and McAfee - nothing else, anyone got any ideas why this is running so slow?

Nelix

 

im sure your machine meets the min specs...

the only thing i can think of it may be drivers, try updating them all... that should help.

edit: just noticed sparky's post.

 

I have a rough benchmark - a machine that didn't have XP on it originaly is usualy too old to have it put on and work well.

There are many reasons why the machine is slow, from lack of memory (already mentioned) to poor drivers. Loading too much in the startup doesn't help either.

You haven't really given us anything to go on - so it is a bit hard to guess what is wrong!

Harry.

 

have you made sure that it is picking up your hard drive as UDMA and not PIO as this can make a big difference to the speed of the machine

goto device manager and click on IDE ATA / ATAPI Controllers

right click primary IDE Channel > Properties > Advanced Settings > and make sure device o is UDMA of some flavour 5 is 100 ATA

 

McAfee is a resource hog IMHO, although it is a decent AV solution, it does slow down boot up times and everything else.

Get rid of it and install Free AVG, it,s much less of a hog and cheaper than more RAM

 

Nelix,

What are the specifications for your computer?

 

or you could try Avast! which is also free and has a smaller memory footprint

 

MAchine Spec's

3 Ghz Intel Proc
1 GB RAM
40 GB HDD
Radeon 256 MB Graphics Card (Dual Monitors running)

I have removed all the hard drives that were in the machine when I had the initial problem and replaced them with a single 40 GB SATA HDD, reinstalled XP and everything seemed fine, ran Windows update and installed McAfee then rebooted only to find that it had slowed down at boot again. I will remove McAfee tonight and give it a test to see if thats the problem.

I am reluctant to believe that McAfee is slowing it down that much as no other machine in the house is this slow, neither are any of the work machines that I have used that are running McAfee.

I will update you tomorrow on the outcome of McAfee removal.

Thanks for your help so far people.

Nelix

 

Nelix,

Your system spec is well above board- let us know what happens when you remove the AV and had a few restarts.

Si

 

I have removed McAfee from all my workstations. I only now run it on SBS and it slows the boot up time of SBS down too. Which when you consider what is running on an SBS box, Exchange, DNS, DHCP, WSUS, Active Directory. It was McAfee that choked it.