ME painfully slow boot, lots of hdd activity.

Hi - I've checked through a search for this, but I can't see anything that helps.

My friend has Me on her Dell PC. It's got a 1.5GHz P4 processor, 40 gig hdd and 128 meg of ram. It takes about 9 minutes to boot, and AOL 9 takes about 3 minutes to eventually connect via a broadband usb modem.
I assume it's a ram-related problem, but the type of ram on the mobo is seriously expensive, so increasing it is not an option. I also assume 128 meg should really be enough. Once it's booted, all apps still run slow and it takes a long time for the screen to refresh etc. Printing is a nightmare....
I've tried using Cacheman to reduce the swap file size and free up some ram, but it doesn't help. I've turned off several "quick-start" items in startup, and this has improved things a little. I also ran a spyware scan and removed a couple of offending apps, but despite incremental improvements, it's still seriously slow. I did have a go at a selective startup via msconfig (I believe) but that really didn't help at all.

Does anybody have some words of wisdom that might help? (If you want more detail, I'll try, but she lives a couple of hundred miles away and I'm at home....)

 

Hello Carly

A number of suggestions:

I also assume 128 meg should really be enough.

WinMe has system diagnostics for real time performance, forgot what they are called but they are under "accessories" > System tools in the start menu.

I doubt very much whether under a full load the system is performing well, but you have to be the judge, I don't know what the startup load is.

Look thru these sites for what can be dispensed with on startup and instead be on demand or not needed:
http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist.htm
http://www2.whidbey.com/djdenham/index.htm

To diagnose RAM health: MS's RAM tool http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp Mem Diag

I also ran a spyware scan and removed a couple of offending apps
What scanner did you run and what did you remove? Removal of malware often leaves peices and my break something.

I would suggest running the on-line virus checkers referenced here: http://www.windowsbbs.com/links.php and downloading/installing SpyBot and Ad-Aware also referenced in the bbs links. After install, update both before scanning.

When scanning, I would suggest shutting down as many apps/processes as possible otherwise will be really slow.

Regards - Charles

 

Many thanks. I'll go through the links and do what I can.

In terms of the health of the ram, I know that to be OK since I booted from CDROM and ran an app called mem86test. It may be the amount that is the problem.

The scan I used was from this page - http://www.spywareinfo.com/xscan.php but I can't remember exactly what it took off. I'll check when I'm on that machine next. It didn't make a big difference to the speed of the machine, and none to the boot time.