Slow PC blues

[Mumpo]

I've had this PC for just over three years. It's got - hang on, let me look... a 1.99GHz AMD Athlon XP 2400+ processor, and 2GB of RAM, and until recently it's run just fine. Lately, however, it's like someone's poured treacle into it. Not only are applications like Photoshop and Flash crawling along, but now, even IE and Firefox seem incapable of rendering pages in less time than it takes to recite the Lord's Prayer. Even the keyboard now seems to be lagging, with each keystroke taking a discernable split-second to register.

I've run my Avast anti-virus check and disposed of the flagged files, run Spybot to clear any other undercover nastiness and even taken a day to defrag the hard drive. What should I be doing to get this thing back up to speed?

[Ginger Yellow]

Slow PC blues

Well, you could always do a fresh install.

Failing that, use the task manager to see what processes you have running and what's using your memory/processor, and Google anything you don't know about. You should also go through your startup list in msconfig and disable anything you don't want.

[Rojinegro]

Slow PC blues

Switch to Ubuntu.

[Max Payne]

Slow PC blues

How much space on the main drive (scratch disks?)

Are the fans all running correctly (Overheating?)

Back up and fresh install not a bad idea, 3 years is a very good run, mine usually barely makes a year.

You could upgrade but eventually they all end up feeling as slow as the old one......

[Max Payne]

Slow PC blues

Rojinegro wrote:

Switch to Ubuntu.

Is it any cop?

[Stumpy Pepys]

Slow PC blues

CC Cleaner is something I find very useful -- it deletes unnecessary files, there's an easy interface to see what's launching on startup and there's a registry cleaner.

I wouldn't recommend wiping your hard disk and switching to Ubuntu. However, what you can do fairly easily is install Ubuntu within Windows, which then gives you an option at startup to boot into Ubuntu. Alternatively, you could run Ubuntu off a USB stick.

Without getting bogged down in a Linux vs Windows borefest, I think everyone should install Ubuntu alongside Windows just for the secure web browsing. If you're a Firefox user already, you'll barely notice the difference.