I have a PC laptop runnung WinME. Recently, it’s running slowly. Very slowly. I think there must be unnecessary processes running in the background. I’m reluctant to stop them willy-nilly because I don’t want to screw thing up. Also, perhaps other things are gumming up the works (though i already ran ad-aware).
Any suggestions are appreciated.
First question, how much memory?
Second question. It started running slowly recently? Have you installed any new software on it? Can you remember the last time it ran ok? etc
How old is your laptop? If it’s got a processor that runs at two or more volts, excessive heat may be slowing you down. Does it get really hot underneath? Two laptops of mine did, and elevating the backs a little combined with running a $3.99 fan from Walgreens across the side of them not only solved the heat problem but also noticably improved performance. They used to crash a lot, too–especially when left on for long periods—but after setting up the little fan, that stopped happening.
If you already ran ad-aware, try running ‘spybot - search and destroy’. It searched for spyware and other processes/registry entries that ad-aware doesn’t scan for. I always run the two in tandem.
The two most frequent issues with laptops are too little RAM and slow hard drives. The two can be a double whammy, because when your machine gets tight on memory resources, it will be swapping to the hard drive more often. The tiny drives that laptops use are generally quite a bit slower than their desktop-targetted larger cousins.
Look for hard drive fragmentation (which can make swapping slower) and memory resident software (like ‘quick loaders’ from QuickTime, Real Media, Microsoft Office, video cards, etc.). If you have a lot of ‘tray icons,’ that probably indicates that you have a lot of background utilities or services running that are squeezing your memory resources.
ME has alot of memory leaks. Even on my desktop winME could kill. I would recommend UPgrading to 98SE if possible. If not… there’s little you can do really. I found that I needed to reinstall ME every month in order to keep it running in tip top shape. Of course… that didn’t last long.
There should not be any problems with your hardware. You do not have too little ram, or too slow hard drives. We know this becuase you state that your system, just recently slowed down. This must be software related. Hardware does not simply slow down.
I do agree about WinME. It’s a dog. If the laptop isn’t terribly new, I don’t know if I’d recommend XP or 2000. You wight want to even try running Win98. It’s older, and thus smaller, and runs better on slower machines.
Sorry to be slow about replying back to suggestions. I had to go out of town. I’ll get back to this thread (and the laptop) on my return.
CB
Get a list of the running processes, and then enter the name on Google. You’ll almost always find enough information to decide if the process is needed or not.
Also, most of these are probably initiated in your start-up process. In there, you can just comment them out, rather than deleting them. That makes it easy to restore one if it turns out to be something you need. There are various web pages available that list common start-up processes, and what programs they are connected to. Search Google for windows start up and you will probably find several such info pages.
This is misleading.
The addition of a piece of software that takes Windows ME below a critical threshhold of free physical memory will in fact cause a slow hard drive to become a problem.
Thanks for all the advice. The problem is fixed!!. What helped the most was figuring out what all the start-up items were and how to disable them (check out this site if you want more information) and getting disc defragmenter to actually run instead of continually hang (for information, look here). Again, thanks.