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I am running XP Pro on my laptop, on power on it now takes four and a half minutes to startup were it used to take just over a minute, the hard disk chunnters away for ages. How do I find out what it is doing and how do I control what it runs at startup?
Regards Paul Shillam
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There can be several problems due to which the system could become slow. try these:
a) Run chkdsk /f on hard disk
b) Run defrag
c) Antivirus & Antispyware
d) Check startups - The Windows inbuilt util is msconfig, but it shows startups in only 2 or 3 places. I would suggest WinPatrol from www.winpatrol.com. It not only shows & control startups, it also gives you a lot of information & control over your system.
e) You have written that your hard disk 'chunnters away for ages'. Do you hear any weird sound ?
Would follow all suggestions above, but first clean all temp folders, the recycler, and the windows\prefetch folder, deleting the contents of each. Have seen just doing that speed up booting and running both.
"The hard disk chunters away for ages" might tell me that the RAM is being filled with startup programs and is spilling over into pagefile. When you get to the desktop, do Ctrl-Alt-Del -> Task Manager -> Performance and look at Physical Memory -> Available. If it seems low compared to the total you may be running mainly from pagefile on the harddrive.
Extra RAM will immediately aleviate that problem, although almost every program you install nowdays wants to run something in the background. I stop anything running at startup that is not necessary (they should be able to be run manually from within the program).
I've tried all of the above, wipatrol showed that there were several programs running at startup that were not necessary and I have disabled them.
I don't know how to clear the windows\prefetch folder?
Matt at the RAM as suggested and Total = 261,592 and Available = 49,162. Could this be my problem.
I've tried all of the above, wipatrol showed that there were several programs running at startup that were not necessary and I have disabled them.
I don't know how to clear the windows\prefetch folder?
Matt at the RAM as suggested and Total = 261,592 and Available = 49,162. Could this be my problem.
Paul
Well you seem to have 256 MB RAM. Its ok. Not great but Windows would run.
Have you noticed any speed increase after going thru all of the above?
To clean windows\prefetch, enable viewing system folders and uncheck the hiding entries in explorer.exe tools > folder options > view tab. Then you'll see the sub-folder under windows. Highlight prefetch in the left pane and use ctrl-a to mark all, and shift-delete to empty the folder.
Think XP needs 512MB minimum RAM for good performance.
After doing all that was suggested my system is still very slow but I think a slight inproovement.
Sparrow, sorry you have lost me at the start, how do I enable viewing system folders.
My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 8100 and Dell tell me that 256Meg is the maximum memory it can support.
Paull
My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 8100 and Dell tell me that 256Meg is the maximum memory it can support
I wonder if you or they aren't misunderstanding this. According to Crucial your board supports up to 512MBs of ram. I believe the largest module you can install is 256 but you can use two of them to get 512.
Go to Crucial and go through their memory advisor tool. When it brings you to the page where it shows the memory available for your system, click the button that says "how much do I need" just below the list of memory chips. It tells you there how much your system can use.
If you only have 256 MBs of ram, it's more than likely the main cause of all the hard drive activity. Feed it some more ram, trim the things that run at startup and it'll probably speed up the startup time. My guess is that at a minimum, you'd notice a difference in the way Windows runs (when it comes to speed).
I am running XP Pro on my laptop, on power on it now takes four and a half minutes to startup were it used to take just over a minute, the hard disk chunnters away for ages. How do I find out what it is doing and how do I control what it runs at startup?
Regards Paul Shillam
Did you run chkdsk and defrag as rsinfo suggested? Since the swap file is a part of the HDD free space, you can check if the drive is fragmented/how much free space u have/ run the disk cleanup and defrag it for improvement.
Yes I have run CHKDSK and Defrag, it said my disk diodn't need defraging but I rand it anyway.
My HDD is 44.6GB with 34.8GB free space.
I have deleted everything in the prefetch folder, (96 items) but still running slow.
The prefetch folder is cleaned out by XP on a monthly basis.
XP has a auto defrag feature that among things re arranges the prefetch items for what it considers good performance based on the freguency of any particular software use. The defrag runs at least once a day given enough idle time.
I have yet to run into a situation where clearing out the prefetch has any positive effects.
