'My Computer' loads slowly or not at all

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

I did a clean re-installation of XP Home on my father's PC. Most things are now working ok, but often after booting up the first time I enter 'My Computer' it takes a good while to identify the drives or it doesn't at all and just gets stuck in limbo, crashing the whole system.

My father isn't very well versed in the language of the PC so the best info I could get out of him was that the whole thing was being very sluggish. I'm concerned that perhaps this is a problem that's been carried over and subsequently isn't something that can be fixed by just reinstalling the OS.

What do you think?

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Specs?

If this is a completely new, clean, fresh as a daisy install then it must be the hardware/BIOS. You should check all the BIOS settings and cable connections inside the case.

 

Spec:

XP Home SP2
Packard Bell
Celeron 2.5Ghz
256MB RAM
75 gig hard disk partitioned 3 ways

What would you suggest I should be looking for in the BIOS?

 

im not sure about the BIOS but have all drivers been installed and there are no conflicts in Device Manager

 

Flip,

Did you do this during the text based setup or afterwards?

Has anything else been added to the Operating System, or is it XP on it's own?

Is the drive reporting any problems in Device manager? If so, what make and model is the drive?

Si

 

I wager you have installed something which is a system hog like Norton security centre or some MF printer bundle.

Also 256MB RAM is not much for XP, double that and things will improve dramatically.

 

I've rolled back to before the installation of my printer software and *touches wood* haven't had that problem again. Assuming this software is the culprit is a likely solution to add more RAM then?

 

Printer software is notoriously bloaty*. You should be able to just install the drivers (not all the other crap that you'll probabaly never use) and you should be OK. 256MB is OK if all you're doing is typing letters and browsing the web, but as soon as you start to do more than that you will find some extra RAM making a huge difference.


* For example, I will print something maybe once or twice a month at home and my printer is switched off when I'm not using it. Therefore, where is the need for me to install some monitoring software on my PC that loads at startup adding about five minutes to my startup time?

 

Yup exactly what baba said!

 

Flip my dell laptop has only 256 ram with xp pro on it. Make sure your virtual memory is double your ram amount and empty those temp files on a reg bases. If I don't, mine start slowing up too. I have gotten into the habit of doing disk clean up under system tools nightly when I'm ready to shut down. I have noticed an improvment since doing this. But I still delete temp files during the day.

 

Flipside,

Is it possible to upgrade the RAM from 256 MB to like 512 MB?

 

Thanks for all the replies, guys. Yes, the printer installation package was full of crap. I'll try again, hopefully only with the drivers. My father only uses the PC for word processing and the internet. I doubt he even knows how to watch a video or play a game anyway! He's a terrible technophobe. I am so tempted to whack a load of his favourite music and videos into the pretty empty partition I made for his files, but they'd probably never get used.

I think I will suggest to him that another 256 of RAM would see an improvement, being that RAM in those quantities is very reasonably priced now. The only other thing I have to convince him of how is getting broadband internet, I cannot use his modem connection, it takes five minutes to load google!

 

if your daddy gonna get bb, then definately get some more RAM, cuz you will need it.