Slow System ideas?

Hello. First post here.

I have a chronically slow system belonging to a friend that I can't find the problem with!

I cleaned it out, all unnecessary programs are disabled. A complete spyware/hijack/virus scan was done. Defraged, scan disked...everything. Still, it takes almost 2 minutes just to bring up the control panel and other screens.

I know he has NOrton anti-virus (which can ****) but he just bought it and he is going to use it no matter what. Could it be the problem for the MAJOR slow computer? He has only used less than 1/3 of a 30 gig HD.

Any ideas?

raingirl

 

raingirl, what's the system config of your friend? (RAM/CPU etc.)

Norton does slow the system down (by 10-50%). You can just disable it & see if it improves the speed.

 

Easy enough to find out if it's Norton...disable it completely and shut down all Norton stuff you can in Task Manager.

If things noticeably speed up, you'll have identified the culprit. Then the owner can decide if he's willing to put up with the performance degradation Norton is causing.

Adding more RAM might help, depending on how much the system has now.

 

I don't have the computer handy, but it's a Dell, about a year or 2 old. It's a work computer actually (business) and Norton is mandatory (well, virus protection is, and that is his choice).

I watched the task manager yesterday while it was acting up, and some programs were popping up on the list, taking up a bunch of memory, then disappeared again. I got the name of one, and it was Norton related, so i suspect that is at least one issue.

I don't think the company will pay for more RAM though, and I don't think he had a lot. Someone suggested to me to disable the virtual memory to see if that helps, but I have not done that before.

The other ODD issue I have is that when I was viewing the msconfig settings, under setup, there are a few questionable entries.

One: a blank entry. No file name, location, or command, nothing. Safe to uncheck you think?

Two: dsentry.exe, one website I found said this could be a worm, but the rest said it was a normal Dell component to disable to "autorun" feature on dvd's.

Three: there were two entries at the bottom that were in another language, either japanese or korean. they are both HKCU actions, so I thought maybe some kind of language hotkey...something?? I asked him, and he thinks he may have installed some language support options, but I have never heard of them showing up in another language in the registry like that. I disabled them, and now an error in the same language comes up during start-up. Any ideas? Is there a way, other than a screen shot, to copy the text to here for deciphering?