Speeding up slow XP PCs - suggested remedies when you've tried the obvious
- From: "Mortimer" <me@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2008 09:21:22 -0000
When a Windows XP runs painfully slowly, there are lots of magazine articles
which suggest the same old things to try: uninstall programs that aren't
needed; scan for viruses and spyware using AdAware and/or Spybot; add more
memory; defrag hard disk; remove any unnecessary programs from All Programs
| Startup and the HKCU/KHLM | Run sections of the registry.
But can anyone suggest a good book or magazine article which goes one stage
further and suggests other remedies for when the default ones don't fix the
problem?
For example I'm trying to speed up a customer's PC at the moment.
The symptom is very long boot times (about 1 minute each on the Windows logo
and the Welcome screens, and a total of 5 minutes before clicking an icon on
the desktop will actually run a program. New programs (or even Control
Panel) take a minute or so to begin after clicking on icons (with lots of
disk thrashing) and repainting of the screen when a window is moved to
reveal another one can take 30 seconds.
Task Manager says there's no excessive CPU usage (normally about 98% idle
process) and the Available memory is around 100 MB ("low memory" disk
thrashing usually happens when you get down to 10 MB or less). There are no
unwanted programs in Add/Remove Programs. I can't see any unnecessary
Startup and HKCU/HKLM | Run entries. AdAware 2007 and Spybot 1.5 now give a
clean bill of health (although they initially removed a lot of crap!). The
disk now has 0% file and volume fragmentation (originally 36% fragmented!).
.
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