Computer SLOW

[schlutzer]

My old xp "back up box" runs an old AMD single core with 256mb of ram and it boots in about 10 seconds.

To help with speed issues WITHOUT spending money:

If you have multiple accounts on the computer, it significantly slows down boot speed. If they arent required, get rid of them. One account will help alot.

Turning off the useless crap at start up is another HUGE thing. to do that:

Start menu > Run> Type "msconfig"

Another window will open up that will have a few tabs.

Click the start up tab and uncheck everything you don't need. Basically you can turn it all off and be fine. But I notice you have what looks like a sound card and a video card, so there will be things in there for them, I would leave those on, as well as anything else essential.

Don't forget, by unchecking you arent uninstalling or anything, your just making it not run by itself. The program will still function when you decide to run it.

Also most people hate to hear this, especially people who wasted their money on the programs but.....

They DO NOT help. The free programs such a ad-aware and spybot do just as good. those 350 things that ad aware found? norton and AVG would have found the same things.

If you actually get a real virus thats going to harm your computer. All an antivirus program is going to do is tell you it can't do anything about it.

 

[User Name missing]

If you actually get a real virus thats going to harm your computer. All an antivirus program is going to do is tell you it can't do anything about it.

OR it'll tell you where its located so you can delete it manually. Had to do that a few times. In the end, if possible, its best to boot into safe mode then run scans. More items are free'd up so its more likely that the problem will be fixed.

Also, I've had bad experiences with external drives. I picked up a 1tb WD external and tried both USB and firewire connections. Either it wouldnt work at all or while transferring data, it failed and corrupted alot of info. I just hope I didnt loose any pics..........

another good program is windows defender. Its free and it solved a problem on a friends machine that no other program could fix.