Before I go out and upgrade based upon my limited knowledge, I thought I’d ask this here.
I am using my kids computer because I am between laptops for a week or so. Their complaints about speed have fallen on deaf ears, but now that I am forced to use this thing, I realize they have been right all along.
I need to speed this thing up.
It is a Dell Dimension DIM 4550 desktop with the following:
WIN XP Home
P4, 4 CPU 2.00 GHz
2.99 GHz, 256 MB RAM
They don’t do any gaming or the like, mostly browser based kids games and social networking.
Go to the Start Menu > Run and type “MSCONFIG” without the quotes, then click the Startup tab in the window that appears. Go down the list and uncheck anything you don’t think you need. If you don’t know what it is, you don’t need it. I can almost guarantee there’s a huge long list of stuff in there; you don’t actually need any of it and in theory, you can uncheck all of them and your computer will start and run just fine. Some of them likely provide useful tools for various bits of hardware and unchecking everything may result in the loss of some functionality. If that’s the case, you can always go back and re-check the ones you want.
Adding more RAM would probably help a lot. 256MB is very marginally acceptible for XP, especially if you have antivirus software, acrobat, quicktime, etc starting with Windows.
In what way was my answer incorrect, thus meriting thy quibble? The question as posed was, “How can I speed my computer up?” Broadband speeds your computer up. Not the “wrong” answer, just a “different” answer.
Actully, broadband doesn’t speed your computer up. It speeds up your connection to the Internet. When using a browser, you might have an “experience” that was “faster” than before, but this isn’t due to any changes in the computer itself. Computers do a lot more than connect to the Internet and having a broadband connection does nothing for the speed of those things. The OP does mention the main use is for Internet activities, so your point is well taken, but you said “Switching to broadband from dialup did wonders for our computer speed” and that simply isn’t true.
I’m with awldune. To improve the performance of the computer itself (“speed” is too nebulous) more RAM would be the best bet. Computers use RAM to process the data coming in on the connection. If your connection speed exceeds your ability to process that data, the extra speed from the connection doesn’t help. Do both!
If you own it, see if you can find and disable Norton/Symantec Antivirus REAL TIME scan. Anti-virus real time scan slowed down my computer performance imensely.
Thanks for the replies. I meant to mention that I was on cable, but forgot. I figured the RAM was way low, but wanted to see if anything else might be recommended.
I checked the startup list and everything there is legit, but I might go ahead and uncheck them all to see what happens as startup takes forever.
Using msconfig to yank out the startup junk will do wonders. Dell is notorious for loading in a ton of stuff that has no business starting up every time. You don’t need RealPlayer, Quicktime and Acrobat loading in at startup, for example - all you get when they pre-load is a longer startup time, and few seconds faster response when you first use the application - assuming you use it at all.
Rather than using msconfig to disable these things, you might want to head over to Control Panel to actually uninstall stuff that you’re certain you don’t need. If you’re not using AOL, for example, you can drop the AOL software that’s probably been pre-installed. Do be careful here, as it’s not hard to accidentally kill something you do need if you don’t know what it is.
If you’re not already doing so, grab some anti-spyware apps like Webroot, Ad-Aware or Spybot and give the machine a scan.
As mentioned above, Norton Antivirus is an utter resource hog. Give some strong thought to replacing it with the excellent and free offerings from AVG or Avast. Unfortunately, removing Norton is not for the faint of heart as it hooks itself very, very deeply into the system, but it is possible.
RAM - At the very least, add another 256 meg. For XP, I don’t recommend less than one gig of RAM, but 512 meg is acceptable. Oh by the way, don’t have any dreams of ever running Vista on this PC.
Have you checked for spyware? Enough spyware running on a computer can really slow things down.
If your startup is slow, that may be related to your hard drive. First, try defragmenting it(Start->Programs->Accessories->System Tools->Disk Defragmenter). This process will take hours, so run this overnight or while you’re at work.
If the hard drive is really old, upgrading to a new one can bring a dramatic performance enhancement to start-up times. Large hard drives are inexpensive, but to get the benefit from them you’ll have to reinstall everything. Someone else might be able to recommend a program that will make an exact copy of your disk.
Get the kids to back-up everything they don’t want to lose.
Then format the hard drive and reinstall Windows.
While you’re at it, upgrade the RAM (from the look of it, 512megs of RAM run about ~$30USD, and will speed it up immensely. If you go for a full gigabyte, it’ll be even faster) It’s a really easy job (undo two latches, pull out the current stick, put in the new one, redo the latches)
Don’t forget to turn off the infernal Windows Indexing Service.
Open My Computer, right click on the hard, drive, uncheck Enable Windows Indexing Service, then click OK. It will go through your files, a few of them will be unable to comply, but the majority of them will go through.
It’ll speed you up like you got hit in the rear by a semi.