Ok, so my parents have an old Dell and they got my old computer, so I set myself to work getting it work on the wifi network, so I wiped it, replaced that hard drive(it had a bad platter) and reinstalled everything, all the drivers were redownloaded from the website(the original drivers cd was lost) and it was faster on account of the complete lack of programs on the hard drive after the reformat, but it was still painfully slow, I'm at loss as to why it's so slow, I've reformatted and reinstalled the OS about 2 times in hopes that it would become more quick to boot, but it's still slow on XP Home, does anyone have any ideas as to why it's so slow, it's had 2 optical drives replaced and a matching stick of ram added, which was part of the options when it was built. The hard drive is right out of my personal computer, so I know it's good. Here are the system specs P4 2.0ghz 1GB RAM (2x512) 80 GB Western Digital and a ti4200 Sound Blaster Live! Linksys Wifi card.
This article that I made with a lot of spelling mistakes (sorry), will present you with solution to increase the performance of that machine boot time and usage. I hope this helps: http://forums.bit-tech.net/showpost.php?p=1570207&postcount=15 You can also disable Windows Theme and welcome screen, this helps even more. Some anti-virus and anti-syware/malware programs could be a resource killer (HDD and/or CPU and/or RAM), try removing them, fo now. First let's get your system up to speed, then we think about protections, and what software is needed. The perception of slow depends and varies on to person to person. It could be that you are used to your faster computer, so the XP machine is very slow. Like my mother computer: P-III 800Mhz, 512MB of RAM, Sound Blaster Live!, WinXP SP2 fully updated, latest drivers, Western Digital 80GB 7200RPM 8MB of Buffer. WinXP runs OK on it... slow, very slow on my taste, but usable. However, the 5 main programs that runs somewhat fine on it, are: - Firefox 2.0 (with a very slow startup) - Internet Explorer 7 - Winamp 5 (good old classic skin) - Windows Media Player 11 (not older, except the Classic 6.0 version of course) - Skype I would guess the problem is simply that today applications, (newer versions) require more overall computer power to run. Remember that due to a higher number of users using more powerful computer, software can be more fancier, added features and less or even none (ahem, Adobe) software optimization. See it's not all about Windows taking more power every versions.... it is your applications that mainly cause issue! You can TOTALLY forget iTunes, QuickTime, and many others. When I had this computer the "forget" software used to work wonderfully... but not anymore. Also, as computer hardware age they decrease in performance a bit. Other then that,
What is slow about it? Is it the load times? General responsiveness? GFX performance? I would look at the hard drive UDMA modes in the BIOS and under Device Manager (I think the fastest is 5) and see what programs you have got running. Also, and I know this sounds daft, but what version of XP are you running (SP0, 1 or 2) and did you connect to the internet before installing any of the updates? Have you scanned for malware? Also, are you comparing it to a new computer or how you remember it ran before you upgraded? Andy
