Very Slow PC

R

rob_gfc

Geek Trainee
I have a Dell Dimension 4400 with 40GB c drive and 120GB F: drive. On boot up it takes 5-10 minutes before I can use it. Task bar has a few items on it, but not that many. Also takes 5 minutes to shut down. It is driving me mad. I have tried PC Booster software and it tells me the PC is running at optimum speed. Any other tricks I can try to get it to run faster? I did have the HD repaired once after a complete system crash. Could it be there are still damaged sectors on the C: drive and this is causing the problem?
 
I'd get ahold of a spyware scanner like [google]Spybot Search & Destroy[/google], and run that. I'd also defrag your hard drives afterwords.
 
Mine has very slow period too, not that bad but when ever I leave it idle with the screensaver ingadged and F@H running for a few hours and then I go back in to do something everything is extreamly sluggish and the animation of my dock and icon clicking as well as the time it takes for anything to open etc. is greatly hindered. Is that normal or do I have spyware too, probably, as I don't have any of those progams installed. At first I blamed it on my 512MB of crappy ram but I don't think that's it.
 
well i think to run the pc more fast is to first run a system scan of any viruses or spyware then a defragment utility like nortons speed disk..i also had spyware on my pc, i used spybot:search and destroy...my pc boots up in about a minute...hope this helps
 
How much RAM do you have? Also, what memory-resident applications are running (e.g. Anti-virus, firewall, weather service, etc)? If you haven't already, you should check out Housecall, which is a free, one-time online virus & malware scanner. Next I'd install AdawareSE and Spybot S&D, update 'em, and let 'em both do a thorough scan.

If you do all this and your PC is still sluggish, it could be system file fragmentation, registry fragmentation, registry corruption, system file corruption, or all of the above. In any of those cases only a reinstall from scratch would completely solve your problem. The other possibility is that your HDD is damaged, which can happen easily if your chassis isn't condusive for HDD cooling. Windows itself compounds this problem since it tends to abuse the privilege of virtual memory. In other words, it uses your hard drive way more than it should, which can wear it out in a relatively short time.

Hope this helps,
-AT
 
I used Spybot S/D and that seemed to make a big difference, I'm also planning on bumping my mem up to 1 gig sometime in the near future, I have a few programs running usually but I don't think it makes much of a difference when I shut 'em off. Thanks all.
 
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