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Slow desktop


Andrew

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The spare desktop is very slow to load. Its not that old, about 5 or 6 years old, and not very much used. Was bought as a work horse for the missus. There's not a lot of stuff installed.

 

A mate said it could be the memory slowing it down. ? Any advice would be smashing :clap3: . And would a new memory dodah solve the problem.

"La conclusión es que los insultos sólo perjudican cuando vienen de alguien que respeto". e5006689.gif

“Vescere bracis meis”

 

 

 

 

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slow to boot will be cpu and hdd based rather than memory

memory will help with speed of printing, and in application operations; not specifically with loading windows.

when is it slow precisely?

does it go fast up until loading the windows desktop, then slows down?

is it slow right through the post and boot section but ok when its loaded windows?

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Slow all the time, well most of the time. Try to open something and it takes for ever ?

"La conclusión es que los insultos sólo perjudican cuando vienen de alguien que respeto". e5006689.gif

“Vescere bracis meis”

 

 

 

 

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XP as for specs, not a clue mate.

"La conclusión es que los insultos sólo perjudican cuando vienen de alguien que respeto". e5006689.gif

“Vescere bracis meis”

 

 

 

 

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XP - longer in tooth than me, Vagabond, Leon, or Phone. No longer supported with security patches and will be more & more out of date as time goes on.

 

That said, how much memory does it have? XP is slow with 1Gb of memory, good with 2Gb, and agile with 4Gb if the main board will support that much memory. If you find it has 1Gb and you plan to keep the machine, a new 2Gb memory stick (not expensive these days) will greatly improve performance but probably not do much for boot time.

 

Slow boot time is probably down to

- too much crap loading at startup

- an operating system (XP in this case) that is a bit wobbly and needs a bit of repair.

 

If you click on the My Computer icon and then on Properties, it will tell you lots of good stuff such as OS (XP), service pack, and hopefully the amount of memory you have. Post a screen shot.

 

If you do start>run>taskmgr you should see the task manager. One tab lists all programs running at start-up and a screen shot of that would also be nice.

 

Whenever XP was acting badly, I always liked to fix the issues so

start>run>cmd then

chkdsk /f and ENTER (note the space between chkdsk and /f)

Answer Yes to doing the deed at next boot then reboot

" My choices in life were either to be a piano player in a whore house or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference!" - Harry Truman, 33rd US President

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XP security support and Office 2003 security support actually finish in April 2014 Newt:..the 8th to be exact!

next up; chances are an XP machine wont be running 64 bit..so sticking 4 gig of ram in is essentially throwing away money! a standard 32 bit system will read 4 gig maximum...but in actual reality nearly 800 of that will become page file and OS running...leaving windows itself barely running with more than 3.1 gig. that's if the old motherboard will handle 4 gig.

far better to dual channel twin 1 gig muddles which should be supported on a motherboard that age; that will nearly double ram speed and allow for faster ram access without throwing away excess budget on ram that wont be read by OS. in XP; unless your running heavy photoshop work of high end gaming (which 90% of only supports vista or above these days anyway) you wont see XP wanting to grab more than maybe 1.5 meg of ram regardless.

 

run my usual clean up routine Andrew:

roguefix.bat (but don't close it once finished, just minimise)

malwarebytes

ccleaner (run both registry and cleanup)

restart

reset internet explorer advanced settings

restore internet explorer settings (both options under internet explorer>tools>advanced)

run ccleaner and head into the TOOLS option. then STARTUP

untick anything in the list you don't recognise as being something you want to run. the obvious ones will be Microsoft; Lexmark or HP printer tools, Skype etc etc basically if you don't recognise its name or where its installed then untick it! if your worried do a quick google of the filename and check what it is.

restart and test.

 

in all honesty I would suggest your flogging a dead horse on a system that old with unknown specs.short of a complete reformat your not going to make much of an improvement unless there is a nasty or two lurking on it.

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Thanks chaps, looks like it will be staying as it is, Still a fall back for my missus for work related tasks.

"La conclusión es que los insultos sólo perjudican cuando vienen de alguien que respeto". e5006689.gif

“Vescere bracis meis”

 

 

 

 

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