Help with a very slow pc.....?

1.Defrag your computer.

2. COmpress files.

3. Transfer files (ex: Pics, vids, music etc) or any other files you don;t normally use on a regular basis to flash drives, External Hard Drives and also File uploader sites that will store your files for free.

4.Run a complete virus scan and diagnostic by Mcafee and/or AVG

5. Make sure you don't have fifty different application windows up at the same time also make sure that these windows are set to open ONLY when you prompt them to, not automatically at startup.

6. Get rid of any extra icons and screen savers you don't need or use

7. I hate to tell you this but if you use FB, you should really get rid all the apps and games you have installed. If you have to...keep one or two, but FB apps SLoooooow your computer and are laced with tracking cookies and spyware that YOU actually give FB permission to install.

8.Messenger programs....Yahoo messenger is notorious for slowing your computer....If you want to keep it, make sure you only log on when you are really going to use it for chat or whatever.

Hope these things help.

All these answers are pretty good for troubleshooting slow pc's but they're all shooting in the dark. PLAIN AND SIMPLE you need more ram! The computer is paging very heavily. Open task manager and click the performance tab look at the PF usage vs physical memory leave task manager open and open Internet Explorer Holy cow you just ran out of ram!!! Even IE6 uses about 100mb of ram just to open the Yahoo home page.

When you don't have enough ram Windows writes what would be in ram to the hard drive. Thats called a page file or virtual memory. When it reads and writes to virtual memory it bottlenecks because the hard drive is so much slower than ram.

15 - 20 minutes to 'warm up' ! That is ridiculous and assuming it is free of infections, it sounds like the hard drive is on it's last legs to me.

I've got a Pentium III 800 here with 256 MB RAM running XP SP3 that boots in less then two minutes

Such an old system will probably be using SDR RAM, so upgrading it will be difficult because it's hard to source larger sticks bigger than 256 MB and it's likely to be expensive too. Even if you've got more modern RAM in it, it will be DDR1 at best and cost £40 or more for 2 x 512 MB sticks

I see somebody recommends you put a SATA drive in it, obviously he doesn't deal with older computers very often because there's no way a PC of that age will support SATA

You have three options IMO

1) Fit a new IDE (PATA) hard drive and put a fresh copy of Windows on

2) Use a 'lite' version of Linux like Puppy Linux (forget the over hyped Ubuntu)

3) Remove the hard drive and give it away on 'freecycle' or similar site

Option 2 makes most (no cost) sense to me, I've temporarily fixed my neighbours PC the same way till she can afford option 1 and her teenage kids are more than happy to be on youtube, facebook etc in what is basically a virus free environment

http://puppylinux.org/main/Download%20Latest%20Rel...

It runs 'live' i.e it runs entirely from the CD and RAM and you could run it with no hard drive at all if you had to. It's best to use some kind of drive though to save your settings and files on.

If the hard drive is as dodgy as it sounds, you could use a USB flash drive for that purpose though

4 GB ones are going for about a fiver nowadays

go through all the files like photos, microsoft word documents, excel documents etc. and delete all the files that are longer needed. and same goes for software including games, applications etc. that should make a bit more free memory space.

maybe you should add some extra memory, you know, hardware, so that you don't have to worry that much about the space?

if you ran lots of checks on the computer, i don't think it's a virus or anything like that, unless it's something that the software can't detect. so try again with the newest version available, and see what happens. but i don't think it's a virus unless the computer's function suddenly became so slow.

because it's xp, it might be that the computer's too old. my laptop is quite slow starting up too and it was bought about 5, 6 years ago so it's quite old.

you could try removing programs like Norton (if it is installed) because programs like that make it slow.

and try removing cookies and things like that too. that might speed it up.

and don't forget to actually empty the 'rubbish' on the computer once you deleted them all or else they won't be fully deleted.

other than that, i can't really think of anything else, except that it's broken due to it being old or something like that.

If I was you I would I would:

Upgrade the Ram to 1GB (Stick another 512MB in)

Keep the CPU (unless you have the money upgrade to a amd dual core 1.5GHZ+)

Ensure you are using the lastest version of Hard drives ( SATA drive 7200rpm with a nice 160GB space is common in most home computers)

Re-installation of a better operating system if possible. ( Windows 7 if possible). If not, re-install XP and install all updates including SP3!

Good anti-virus such as AVG 9.0 (free)

If you can do these steps I gurantee you will see such an improvement!! and should cost you to much for the minor mods!!

I built many computers. One that I use cost me just £300 to build.

Main Specs:

Gaming Case

MATX Motherboard

3GB Ram

500GB Hard drive (Sata)

3 CD drives

dual core amd 3GHZ processor

128MB graphics

Windows 7 Ultimate

and much more!!!

I would say that A: you have a bad - dieing hard drive.

and B: you need more RAM.

So I would suggest that you get a new computer and forget about this one. It is too old to run the newer software out today and is just to frustratingly slow to be any fun to use. You can get a half way decent whole computer at Walmat for about $350 now a days. Or look on Craigslist for a newer computer with a faster processor.

Okay, my sister had a similar problem. She had an older computer with 512mb of ram, but it was slower than it should have been. My brother had a look at it and figured out one of the ram cards wasn't correctly inserted. I'm not saying this is your problem, but it was for my sister. He pushed it in properly and the computer ran double the speed.

If she's only got 512M RAM that's the place I'd start looking first to upgrade. She can probably have 2G max of ram and that's going to really make that old box cook.

The other think you want to look at is how much free disk space she has. If she's running low on HD space then that could be slowing it down with the virtual disk that windows uses to swap memory to the HD. If it's having to look everywhere for those bits it's going to be slow.

And as far as freeware, continue to use it. There's nothing wrong with freeware. It's never slowed down my machines in all the years I've used it.

I would also suggest you look at My Defrag, a free defragmenting program. That may help you out a bit too.

Also check how much swap space she's running. I changed mine down a bit and my box ran somewhat faster as well.

Good luck!

Virus or junk. or just add more ram. From my experience, most r junk. plz clean your pc components to speed up your pc. It's easier to make use of some programs to help that, such as Tipard Registry Cleaner. Or u can also go to http://www.92download.com/blog/tipard-registry-cle...

There are guides in detail on this aspect.

Hope it can help u. Good luck.

hi,

i also have same config..but i have 1 gb ram..in past i also faced same problem..right now i m using this application Advanced System Optimizer..it really improve my system performance..reduces booting time of my PC..it has useful features that cleans & optimizes ur PC..it contains

Registry Cleaner+Registry Optimizer

Disk Tools+Disk Optimizer

System Cleaner

System Protector

Driver Updater.

Works Well..!! Try it.