My Windows XP is now sluggish

[Nelson Bradford]

very slow when moving between programs, etc
Suggestions???

[Dave McClung]

very slow when moving between programs, etc
Suggestions???

When mine slows down, it is usually the Virus Protection Program that is doing it. It is worse when I first start using the computer and gets better after a while.

Try pressing crtl/Alt/delete all at the same time. The Task Manager will pop up. Look at the first tab, "Applications" to see which programs are running. Turn off applications one at a time until you find out which one is causing your problem.

If there are no applications running, you may have to go to the second tab, "processes" to find out which is the problem. Start at the top of the list of processes and turn them off one at a time until you find one that is causing the problem.

Dave

[Norayr Hajian]

This is what I've recommended to a friend who is having slow response from a computer. It may or may not be helpful to you, but it might be the right thing for someone else. This is what I wrote...


Regarding your slow computer: 4 minutes is way too long for a computer to boot without getting the boot. What you need, plain and simple, is a good old fashioned Nuke & Pave. Trust me; everything else you do will be of little help. As well, you will have a computer that will run every bit as fast as it did the first day you brought it home.

As for upgrades; the only upgrades I really ever recommend (and that is not always - only if the computer isn't too old - your older computer you had was too old - but the one you got a year or so ago isn't)... the only upgrade I really recommend is sometimes a video card and additional RAM (memory). Windows XP likes lots of RAM (I hate to imagine what VISTA would want :eek: ). If you are running plain old windows without fancy games, 256 MB will get by, but not all that great. 512 is certainly better. If you are going to run games then 1 GB is really helpful, but even more so, if you are running games you want a decent video card in it because almost all the work the computer does when playing games is through the video card.

Now, back to the Nuke & Pave... This is done in three easy steps :-)
1) Back up everything of any importance
2) Nuke
3) Pave

That was easy, wasn't it ???

To back up, you can do one of two things:
1) Copy data to CD's or DVD's
2) Copy data to either an external hard drive or a secondary internal hard drive.

Either option will work well and has advantages. If you copy to DVD's, you get about 4.7 GB on a disk. If you don't have TONS of digital photos and music and especially if you don't have video to back up, the DVD option is reasonable. However, if you have virtually any video to backup or lots of music and photos, then a second hard drive (internal or external) is best. I bought an external 250 GB Hard drive for about $140. You can get an internal 250 GB hard drive for around $100. An external one is nice, because you can back things up and put it somewhere safe - away from the computer. You can even use it to back up more than one computer or to transfer large files between computers. That's probably my best recommendation.

OK, now that you've backed up your data (all your email stuff, address books, photos, music, saved game files (not entire game programs, just the game files), documents, etc, etc), then you can Nuke.

This is where it gets a little tricky - but hang in there - you CAN do it!

You will have one of two options - depending on what came with your computer.

1) You will have a Windows XP disk and additional Driver disks that came with your computer.
2) You will have a Restore disk that came with your computer.

If you have a Restore disk(s) - that makes things fairly simple and straightforward. Basically, you start the computer with the restore disk in the CD drive and it "should" come up with an option to restore. By "restore" it means wipe out everything off the face of your hard drive and automatically put all the original files back like when you first bought the computer. You might need to look up instructions on your CD or that came with your computer. The problem with this method is that you also end up with all the junk programs that came with your computer (outdated and unwanted anti-virus; AOL or similar online programs; and a bunch of nonsense that software companies probably pay big money to have included in your computer for the purpose of eventually slowing down your computer and getting you to buy their software). Yuck. Whenever I "restore" someone's computer, I then uninstall all the unnecessary junk.

If you have a Windows XP disk - it is a little tougher, but there is also benefits for doing it the hard way (like you don't end up with junk and outdated programs that you don't want installed anyway). If you do have a Windows XP disk, let me know and I'll give you instructions for that.

[Cecil Wallace]

I've gotta say that both my desktop and my laptop are taking too much time to boot up.
I'm fairly convinced that I made a big mistake recently because after about 2 years of owning these two Dell products, I decided, against my best judgment, to do all the Windows updates. I had never done any updates.
There were 75 updates!
And now, my boot up is a lot slower than before.
The laptop is also sluggish at all times, probably because it does not have the power that my desktop has installed on it.

I never worried about the updates, because I do not use MSIE for my browser (I have always used Netscape or Firefox), nor do I use Outlook Express for E-mail.

[Norayr Hajian]

I don't know why your computer is slow; I have all the latest updates on my WinXP Pro computer and it takes 37 seconds from the power button to the login screen.

[Bob Wright]

When your hard drive is over 50% full your system will become slower....Maybe you have too many barn pics on it. I'm sure you have tried check disk and defrag. Dave had a good suggestion. TSRs will eat you up if you don't take care of them. Msconfig can help with that, if you just kill the processes, they will resume when you reboot. Viruses and spybots can also drastically slow down a system. I would recommend Avast Anti-virus; it is free and pushes updates to you, rather than you downloading them. We have had lots of problems with subscription based programs, like Norton, Mcafee, etc. Avg isn't targeted as much, but I'm sure it will have the same problems as Norton, etc. eventually......Spybot, Adaware, Windows Defender, Spyware Blaster are all free programs that fight Spyware. If none of that works, get someone to save your data, reformat, and reinstall your operating system. Then put your data back on. I stay busy doing just what I have been talking about. Every day we get customers who have slow computers or can't connect to the internet. Don't feel lonely.

[Gina Stevenson]

Question, Bob: Did you remove AVG, or just add this AVAST to it? AVG has been good for so long, would hate to think of removing it, so hoping your answer is that they don't clash, and both can be used, so that one might catch what the other one misses?

Thanks!

[Bob Wright]

I really don't think you would want to run both. It isn't a good idea to use more than one anti-virus program, because they fight each other. Avast is really more than Anti-virus. It includes several shields: P2P, IM, Internet email, Outlook/Exchange, Standard Shield, and Web Shield. They don't even recommend using a firewall with it. You can give it a try if you like; AVG might not mess with it too much. One of the neat things about Avast is that you can schedule a boot scan and clean out viruses before you get into windows. Of course, you need to first disable restore or you will probably have the virus return from there. Give it a whirl, Avast has a 60 day demo that you can remove if you don't like it. You must register it within the 60 days (free) in order to extend updates for another 13 months. If anyone needs help with registration, I have a word file that explains the proceedure on how to register. I'll be glad to email a copy. Good luck.

[Rich Hudson]

Amen! Avast is a lean, mean virus crunching machine. I use it at home and on my church computer with excellent results, a clean computer with fast boot and shutdown. McAfee got to the point where it's constant top heavy downloads made the first few minutes of computing a dog.

[Floyd Laabs]

very slow when moving between programs, etc
Suggestions???
Just a quick suggestion, I would remove one of the two programs for the Anti-Virus, I have worked with AVG for about 10 years now and run it on all of our computers at church and on mine at home. Recently I had to unistall it from 2 computers of our members because they had gotten talked into running Norton and paid for it for a year, thanks to one of their visiting relatives. Have you Defragged the H/D? The other program I would download is from lavasoft.com and they have a free spyware program that is great. If you have not ran a progarm like this, it could help things along allot. Also, Windows XP uses app. 243k ram at idle, so I suggest 1 gig memory. Vista barely squeaks by with 1 gig, the Techs I deal with suggest a min of 2 gigs of Ram and 4 gigs if you want to do anything. Most of the people I know are going back to XP and tossing Vista. CNEt, just posted an article that Dell (not my fav) are offering XP in the consumer line again. There business line offers XP pro as the standard.... Makes you think.... Let me know some specs on the machine, memory, h/d available, processor, age, noises ie whining, hard driving working harder?.... Good luck!! and I hope this works if not, let me know.