My friend has a dell demension desktop that is running way slower than it should. I can't figure out why. Her CPU is a P4 2.66 GHz; with 1.25GB PC2700 RAM; 80G HDD (using 25%); The only hard ware installed is a printer, high speed modem, and ipod. I updated the drivers for those, and still no help. I also went through add/remove programs and got rid of those that she will never use, I did not remove any system critical programs, I'm an advanced user so I know what not to delete. I also went into the system tools and stopped some services for running auto on system boot. Like her Ipod, I set to manual, Printer (not spoolsvc) I set to manual, etc. I also ran a defrag on the HDD. Still, not much difference.
Win xp pro, pen 4, norton antivirus, Win firewall. After I downloaded and installed Windows Live Messenger the defrag process wouldn't defrag all the files. I reformatted my computer without WLM and defragging was not a problem, worked like a charm. So, I downloaded and installed WLM again, and lo and behold the same problem occurred, the defrag program would not defrag all the files. I uninstalled WLM and defrag process still wouldn't defrag all the files. How do I solve this problem of not being able to defrag all of my files without reformatting my computer.
My computer has been sluggish here lately. I have Ad-Aware, Asquared, Spyware Blaster, Spybot and just recently added AimFix and CCleaner (CCleaner seemed to clean a lot of junk out this morning). So can you help me with HJT Log if you think that will help and do you reccommend the above, cleaner, sweepers, scanners?
My XP Pro HD has been performing very sluggishly lately. Takes forever for apps to load, and there is almost freezing between switching between programs sometimes.
I have a XP system that I thought I had fixed (random rebooting) this is pasted from my last post....
Now the machine.... Antec case with true 380s power supply, ABIT AV8 board,2 sticks of pc3200 512 mb ddr400 ram , Amd Athlon64 3500+ (not oc) ,Nvidia geoforcefx 5900xt card running XP Pro with SP1 installed.
What I have tried ...ran antivirus , ran spywarecleaner, defrag, ran memtest,adjusted to failsafe defaults in bios , flashed the bios, tried diff combinations of slots for memory, upgrade driver , upgraded via 4-1 drivers
A couple days ago figured it must be power supply (brand new one too) so I started unplugging devices ..second cd rom and fan pulled and everything has been running great since.Question before I drop $60 on power supply what should I look for , where is a good supplier and most important do you think this will solve the problem.
Windows Explorer has about a two to five second delay (can work with other programs during delay, but can't open start menu or do other explorer functions) when navigating through folders and doing some context menu functions, such as deleting, cut & pasting, etc.Windows Explorer runs at full speed when creating new folders and files through context menus and while navigating through windows in the mini navigation windows, such as the window that opens when you wish to open a file with a program such as WinAmp.Recent actions before condition was noticed.I was trying to hook up to the net through the hotel's LAN drop with an ethernet cable. I finally get Windows to correctly detect the DNS server and begin surfing and attempting to play Warcraft III online. I play a horribly laggy game and then quit out and reboot my computer.I scan for viruses and find none, though I get a read error about some windows/system/ntos.something or what not. I decide to find some XP performance tweaking tools and found a recommendation for Ashampoo WinOptimizer and XP Smoker. I try both and neither fix the problem, but they cleaned out all my cookies I noticed. I uninstalled Ashampoo, but keep XP Smoker.
I am in the process of shoping around for additional RAM for my Dell 4600 Desktop. I have all the system stats I think I need to make sure everything matches, but I am not sure about latency, or timing. I have used the wizards on memory suplier homepages to determine what I need. Most answers come up with similar results, but modules vary in timing. Some are 2-3-3-6, 2-3-2-5 and others 3-6-6-8. Should all my modules be matching, and how can I find out what my present ones are. Is there an analysis tool I can run?
How can I determine if I have a video card installed in my pc that supports dual monitors?And if so, will using a VGA splitter cable allow me to use either of them for differnt task?
I'm runnin XP Pro with a P4 2.6 ghz processor overclocked to 3.2 ghz. I have 2 IDE hard drives with my main drive as master with 3 partitions and my slave drive as cable select with 2 partitions. Any time I use explorer (not internet explorer, i'm talking about the normal windows OS) to access any of my volumes it takes a hell of a lot of time to show the files in the window. Usually, it takes about 30 seconds for the files to show, and during that 30 seconds, explorer.exe stops responding. What is my problem, and how do i fix it?? I've defragmented everything, but haven't screwed with my page file, if that has anything to do with the problem.
I used to use a web site that you could cross reference items that ran at startup to determine if they were required, optional, or otherwise. This site does not seem to be working currently and am looking for some alternative.
I don't know what happened, all the sudden while my daughter was in the middle of being on the internet website called evergirl.com (kids games & talk like barbie.com) the computer hung up and got real sluggish. After she was able to close completely out of it I restarted the computer. It came on slowly and gave an error message, as I went to write it down, it blanked off (it said something about unable to open *some* local files and something about a *damaged* registry key. Then it opened to a desktop from like when we first got the computer, most my files are their but the shortcuts are gone off the desktop and mozilla asked if I wanted to import all my data from OE.
I have a 5-year old Compaq laptop now running XP SP3. As sold it came with 256MB RAM, but I had it upgraded to 512MB at the time of purchase.I have recently upgraded it to 1GB RAM, replacing all the existing RAM with 2 x Kingtson 512MB chips. At the same time I changed the SP pagefile setting from 'custom' to 'system managed', and when rebooted the system created a larger page file.Sadly I have seen little if any improvement in boot or loading speed, nor does there seem to have been any reduction in the amount of disk paging which seems to go on in the background while the screen hangs. How can I determine the best settings for the pagefile please? I've read the MS knowledge base etc, but I'm really no clearer as to what to do - and a query to MS "support" merely pointed me back to the knowledge base.
I have a new dell computer. the hard drive is 80 gigs, i have about 65 gigs free. recently the computer has become very sluggish and choppy. when i start it up the windows music which plays is now very choppy sounding. often when i start up programs an error message appears that says 'virtual memory too low, cannot complete operation' or some thing to that effect.
I have a user who is accumulating files in his %temp% directory at an average rate of 3 per minute, and they don't clean up on their own, so he ends up with hundreds of built up files daily.Their names all start with "ver" then have numbers and letters, like "ver7b905", the only part that is consistent is the first three letters. Is there a troubleshooting method I can use to determine what is creating these files, or a master list somewhere to look it up like we can with file extensions? The system is XP Pro SP2.
I have a question for those doing Windows Update manually using Internet Explorer. Does it take a long time for Windows Update to scan your computer and determine which updates are needed?
After clicking "Express" or "Custom" from within the Windows Update home page, it seems to take 10-15 minutes for the site to finally tell me what updates are needed.
Ever since I installed Webroots SpySweeper, my computer has been running much slower than usual - even after I uninstalled the program and all its remanents from my registry. The worst part however, is media. Ever since then, any audio and video does not play properly on the computer - it just lags and plays very choppily.My computer has tested free of any spyware/adware/malware, as well as any viruses. Almost nothing is set to start up with my computer, and the registry is cleaned. As well, Opera is the only web browser I ever use, and I do not have my windows set to automatic update.
I'm about to try reinstalling XP because it's been sluggish for months already, so I want to see if this will help, since I suspect a Trojan or whatever.Anyway, the reinstall disc offers 2 options:
(1) Upgrade
(2) new reinstall
If I choose upgrade, would I risk that my system would remain with its present problems? Or should I rather choose new reinstall?
Recently installed StyleXP and applied one of those Vista Themes which changed the start menu and my desktop icons, however my pc started moving sluggish so I uninstalled it.
Everything went back to its original state except for my internet explorer 7 icon which remained as the icon from the theme (internet explorer 6 icon).
I tried uninstalling the reinstalling but this did not work
How do you determine what the items are that are listed in the Sys Config Utility (msconfig.exe), startup tab? My system has a few listed that only have a registry entry listed in the Location column--the other two columns are blank. I'd like to know what they are.
How can I determine what startups apps and services should be checked in msconfig? I find some old posts regarding this topic on the forum, but the info seems outdated and the links provided are no longer valid. My PC starts very slowly and seems bogged down.
Windows XP is having some hangups.When logging on, using either my account/profile or my wife's, it takes 5-8 minutes for the system to be ready to use. I imagine some of the problem is that there are too many programs operating, but I'm not sure how to alleviate that problem.Second, the hardware wizard keeps appearing, yet there is no new device connected to the computer.
have a laptop running windows xp sp1 and i recently for the first time tried to run windows update. The page it loads says "Checking if your computer has the latest version of Windows updating software for use with the website
The website uses ActiveX controls to determine which version of the software your computer is running. If you see an ActiveX warning, make sure the control is digitally signed by Microsoft before installing it or allowing it to run."
I noticed some irregular occurences on my system, starting off with “My Computer” opening the same folder at startup (C:program files ero I think) and taking a LOT longer to shutdown/restart than normal (anywhere between 5 & 15mins to shutdown). Occasionally ckdisk would run at boot and after analysing would go through the process of recovering orphaned files (on both C: and F:
So I had this awesome post and it was removed by ctrl z. Touch pads on laptops FTL I tell ya. I'm going to make this short and sweet. I'm using two 150gb raptor HDD's connected with SATA. I had windows vista ultimate x64 installed but I didn't like it so I decided to buy windows xp MCE 2005 and here is my problem I'm trying to do the install but it continues to give me the BSOD. Even after I read a thread about the same issue, I couldnt get pass the BSOD and the topic was locked so here I am.
My raid is set to auto detect but I dont have a raid setup since I'm allowing xp to do this for me. I did have one setup for vista but I deleted it thinking I needed to start fresh for xp am i right? I boot from CD and tried to hit F6 but nothing happens. I let it go and continue with the loading. Here's where I'm at now. Windows Setup Setup could not determine the type of one or more mass storage devices isntalled in your system, or you have chosen to manually specify an adapter. Currently , setup will load support for the following mass storage devices.....
My general understanding is that it isnt necessary to defrag very often. An occasional defrag should do the trick. Unless, maybe, youve done a lot of stuff recently. I do have several questions though that I hope someone can clear up for me and anyone else that might be interested.
1. Does a pre windows defrag program help any at all? If so, how often should it be run?
2. Is this different than the pre installed Microsoft chkdsk program? Isnt it also a pre windows defrag program?
3. Is one or the other better? Or are they basically the same?
4. What happens if, on occasion, you use a pre windows defrag program and the chkdsk program? Is there a conflict?
5. Does one try to write a certain way and the other rewrites a different way and therefore your wasting your time and effort?
6. Does a pre windows defrag program make a windows defrag program unnecessary?
7. Since it has been stated that the windows defrag program works fine, but isnt the greatest, what if you use a different combination, like, JkDefrag and a pre windows program? I mention JkDefrag because, if you wanted, it can be set to defrag daily or weekly. Set and forget.
8. Assuming one is doing a lot of stuff, when does a registry defrag program enter the picture? Or is one ever needed? Is this just a marketing thing?
9. And, of course, there are also registry cleaners. Again, assuming your doing lots of stuff.
10. And also theres also programs like CCleaner program, which cleans out cookies, temp files, etc.
11. Is there an order that one might want to run these programs? Even if it is only monthly or even less often?
So, my inquiry, isnt which program is better, as I would assume there would be a lot of opinions about that. But rather, what combo might one want to have on hand, or run, on those occasions that you feel the need to defrag. Again, if we look at the CCleaner program, in basically one step, it does a pretty good job of cleaning out all sorts of stuff. If you wanted, it can even be set to clean automatically. Set and forget. If one were to do the same steps, manually, it would take much longer, and maybe, still not be as effective as the CCleaner program. I have Zone Alarm firewall. Basically its set and, for the most part, forgotten about. I have the AVG anti virus program, set to do auto scans on a daily basis. Set and forget.
Depending on the "Expert you speak to" they all have their own opinions. One tells me to defrag daily, another tells my it will damage the hard drive to defrag daily and should not defrag more than once a week.
Unable to defrag my computer. Get message Disk Defragmenter has detected that CHKDSK is scheduled to run on volume HP-Pavilion(c Please Run Chkdsk /f When I tried to run Chkdsk /f, I get the message: The type of system is NTFS Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another process would you like to schedule this volume to be checked the next time the system restarts (Y/N)Yes or No I still Can't Defrag and continue to these messages.
