My home computer is an emachines T1100 with the following features:
Microsoft Windows XP preinstalled
1.0 GHz Intel Celeron Processor
CD-RW 12x Max Write Re-writable Drive
128MB SyncDRAM
20GB Hard Drive Ultra DMA/66
3D AGP Graphics Intel Direct AGP
56K Data-Fax Modem ITU V.92 ready
At present 7.89 GB on the hard drive are used, 11.1 GB are free.
My computer seems to run a lot slower than it used to. I just did a “disk cleanup” to free up more space on the hard drive, but it’s still running slow. (I don’t know enough to know whether I should click the “Compress drive to save disk space” option – I don’t know what that would do.) It boots up slowly, it shuts down slowly, and often the cursor hangs up entirely for several seconds or even minutes. The problem is worse when I have several windows open at once (which I usually do – Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, and Microsoft Word). Often my computer encounters a problem and has to close a program; an error message usually is automatically sent to Microsoft, but I never get any explanation or instructions back. I had some spyware problems so I installed X-Cleaner and Norton Symantec Antivirus. It got rid of the spyware, but the computer boots up even slower because I have to wait for the X-Cleaner to run before doing anything else; and the Norton Antivirus often seems to be slowing things down when I send or receive e-mails or open an Internet page. Not only that, but the Norton Antivirus seems to block me entirely from viewing a lot of images, in e-mails and in Web pages. Occasionally the Norton program runs an automatic check of all files on my hard drive – which takes hours, and while it’s running everything else I try to do is slowed down even more; and at the end when I enter the instructions to delete identified suspect files, somehow the same files always seem still to be there next time the program runs.
Is there anything I can do about this? What on Earth is “de-fragging your hard drive,” and is it something I can do myself, or do I need to take the CPU to a computer store? Should I go through my e-mails and Word documents and delete all I don’t absolutely need? (I’m a horrible pack rat that way.) Do I need to buy some kind of memory add-on? Help! Please help!
Do all the spyware things mentioned in the various sticky threads - different programs find or miss different things. And get rid of any anti-spyware programs that run in the background, because they’re doing more harm than good.
Defragging is simple - there’s a link to the Disk Defragmenter program somewhere in the Start menu (not sure where, mine’s all rearranged ). Load it, select the drive, and defragment it. Nothing else for you to do, and you can carry on using the computer while its chugging away (although you’ll notice a performance drop because it’s working the disk hard).
On the hardware side, 128MB is the absolute minimum for XP to even function - upgrading this would help a huge amount. But we’ll leave that one for now…
It sounds like you might still have spyware. Read this thread, specifically the area about spyware. I recommend using a combination of Spybot S&D and Adaware for spyware removal.
You can set options in NAV to limit its checks. It would probably work fine to have it run one complete virus scan each week, starting at a time when you are sleeping. Naturally you will need to leave your computer on during this time.
Also make sure your copy of XP has the latest updates. You can let Windows do this automatically or control it yourself. Go to Microsoft’s web site to look to see if you need to download any critical patches.
Regarding your machine, it’s not a speed demon by today’s standards, but it should be plenty servicable. Probably the biggest and easiest performance increase to the hardware would be adding more RAM.
First, don’t compress the disk. Disk compression is used to compress the file on the hard disk to make more space. You have plenty of disk space so I would not worry about it. It won’t speed anything up and it used to slow things down though I am not sure about XPs compression utility. With 11 gigs free you do not have to worry about space. Drive space isn’t going to affect speed unless it is really low.
Second you need to check what you have running on the computer at startup. To do so go to start->run, type in msconfig and hit ok. Click on the startup tab. This shows all the programs that run when you start your computer. These things take system resources which make things run slower. You probably have a kajillion things in there. If you uncheck an item it will not run at startup anymore. The thing is you probably do not know what those start up items do. You can go to google and type in the name of listed under ‘startup name’ on the startup tab to find out what it is and whether or not you need it to run. You can also look at start->programs->startup to see what is running there.
Third(actually you should do this first) you need to go to Symantecs web site and find the instructions on how to remove the stuff that Norton is flagging as infected since Norton is not geting it done. They should have the information on the site.
About defrag. Defrag is a utility that basically straightens out the files on your hard disk. When you save a file to disk it gets written in tiny little chunks. Sometimes the chunks are spread all over the disk, or fragmented, which slows down file access as the disk needs to go all over the place to open the file. Defragmenting the drive basically takes these little chunks and puts them back together. It is a good thing to run and makes access times somewhat quicker.
The RAM ‘sharing’ is only an issue if anything uses graphics facilities. If it’s basic VGA stuff, then the video RAM is not relevant. For basic web/email/word processing, 128MB is capable. But at the limits of ‘capable’.
Free: I’d set the swap file to 512 megs of RAM, do the usual spyware/virus flush and ditch any unecessary programs starting up. Check the task manager while you are connected online and see if anything (like IM clients or strange “mystery” processes) are eating up CPU power (-these things won’t run when you are offline, only when you are online!).
Also I swear to God, I have noticed that a heavily-fragmented XP drive does speed up after defragmenting. Having all the pieces of a file in one row sure sounds a lot faster than having the read/write head need to move around for them–especially in what is -probably- a 5200rpm/2Mb hard drive.
Not Free:
At the further reaches of it:
…add more RAM, 256 megs at least if it will take it, you’ll see a big difference. Guaranteed.
…you might be using onboard graphics, and in that case you could get a cheap 4X AGP card with 128 megs that would speed things up a bit too. Assuming your computer has a tower-style case: is the monitor plug oriented horizontal or vertical? Looking around, I am seeing Win98 drivers for this card; it may be pretty ancient tech. Price might be $25-$35?
…also you probably have a Winmodem (software-based) modem. A hardware-based serial-port modem would handle the internet connection better and help the computer run a bit faster, but such modems cost ~$120 new; a typical phone line will go from 3.8-4K/sec to 4.5 K/sec. If you are absolutely, positively stuck with a phone line connection, upgrading the modem is worth considering.
~
Ummm…what defragmenter do you use? Cause in my experience, you cannot do ANYTHING while it’s chugging away, or it resets. Hell, I think that even moving the mouse causes it to reset.
Yeah, you can’t touch the computer (except maybe freecell) while doing a defrag. Any file movement on the system will cause it to restart. I usually leave it before I go to sleep and it’s done when I get home from work (460+ gigs = ~20 hours of defrag)
Oddly, Microsoft’s anti-spyware (made originally by Giant) is pretty good. Download it (free) and use it.
). Load it, select the drive, and defragment it. Nothing else for you to do, and you can carry on using the computer while its chugging away (although you’ll notice a performance drop because it’s working the disk hard).