We bought a "family" PC a few years ago, a dell whatever, with xp media. It has never been anywhere near as quick as the PC we parents get
to use. We had assumed it wqs because the kids loaded crap on it and used it for games (SIMS was a favourite) However, we did a HDD wipe and fresh
install of media a while ago, but seemed not a lot better. Al the sims stuff got re-installed etc. We have just uninstalled SIMS to see is that helps,
and now the 'puter freezes. It is currently in safe mode running malwarebytes.
We recently backed up all the important stuff off it (pics and muzak) so happy to do a fresh install again, but will we be wasting our time? Can we
somehow downgrade to the superior XP? Might help? Or maybe a fresh HDD too??
What is the collective wisdom on this? (me typing from a tesco's compaq that was cheaper and rather better! but it is running windoze 7)
Bleepingcomputer.com & majorgeeks.comare both good sites Ive used in the past.
Ive never had a computer problem since I moved onto laptops, and the "kids" got their own.
Kids? give em linux and enjoy problem free computing
What is the spec on the pc?
was it one of those very small amounts of RAM pc's which was never destined to run well unless the RAM was added to?
It would probably need 1GB of RAM to run properly and ideally more but sometimes they only came with 0.5 GB which meant that the machine spent most of
its time loading and unloading the swap files instead of doing what it was supposed to do.
If it's updating itself and has a small amount of ram (as mentioned above) then it will gradually slow down as M$ gets the OS to do more work
(through service packs and updates).
That being said, XP of any flavour should run reasonabl quickly on slow(ish) PC's. here are some basic tips to troubleshoot performance:
Find out how much RAM you have and are using - Right click on task bar>Task manager, go to performance TAB, you'll see CPU and Memory graphs
as well as 'physical memory'
Confusingly, the memory graph is in GB and the total memory in MB - divide the 'total memory' figure by 1024 to get GB.
If memory used is within 60% of the total memory I would consider adding more. These days I would recommend at least 2GB for any windows OS
Crucial have a good 'memory advisor' tool, they'll tell you how much memory you can add to your PC (then sell you some of course 
Running out of memory has a serious impact on performance - trust me on this one
The other stat to look at here is the CPU usage, if it's consistantly over 40-50% then 'something' is chewing cpu cycles (and therefore
performance that you could be using for stuff.
In this case, click on the 'processes' tab in task manager. sort the processes by the CPU column - ignore 'system idle process' -
that basically means 'waiting for something to do'.
If you see another process with a consistantly high number, type the process name into google - that will usually give you a good idea of what's
causing problems.
If these both seem fine, and you're fairly sure there's no malware involved, you could consider getting an SSD (solid state) hard disk.
These are extremely fast drives and are getting cheaper every week - you'd need a spare sata port (small hdd connectors) not the old parallel
ribbon cable connector. For a cheap one you don't get much space, but performance is way ahead of an old HDD. If it's an old PC it may not
be worth the expence!
The pc will not even start up at the moment. I have googled the model, and dell state there is an issue with their "network advisor" so it
may be a reload, and then remove anything dell related.
Marvellous really.
If that doesn't do the trick I may see if I can borrow a non-branded xp isntallation disc. I presume my COA will work on it?
quote:
Originally posted by cliftyhanger
If that doesn't do the trick I may see if I can borrow a non-branded xp isntallation disc. I presume my COA will work on it?