Okay..I am beyond frustrated. Can any of your computer gurus help? I have a Dell Dimension 2400 (no bells and whistles). For some reason I cannot get my start-up speed to increase. By this I mean I turn on my computer and it takes close to ten minutes for my computer to open IE7 and begin working. When I start it up the desktop comes right up then I have a Printer/scanner/fax that is in my startup and Trend Micro and the only other thing is my Embarq high Speed Internet. All of these pop up very quickly but then the lights on the CPU just keep going and nothing happens for almost ten minutes and then I can finally bring up IE7. It is like there is some HUGE program bogging this thing down. I have turned off everything non-essential in my startup and run all kinds of programs to increase my speed and find spyware that may be slowing it down and I cannot get this thing to go faster. Are there any free optimization programs out there? All the ones I have found say free and when you run them it scans the computer but when I go to optimize it says I have to buy the program to optimize.
I don't know much about this sorta thing...but... for what its worth..have you ever tried windows washer...its a webroot software product and seems to keep my computers cleaned out ...cookies and such and running pretty smooth and fast. www.webroot.com/consumer/products/windowwasher/ - 13k
Couple of things you can try - with that much time to open IE, I would still suspect some type of malware/spyware issue. A good site to use to scan your PC for problems is Ewido (http://www.ewido.net/en/). Once you get to the site, click on the Scan Now link on the left hand side that reads "Scan your computer now online and clean it for free!" I've had good results in the past with Ewido, which found problems that Ad Aware and SpyBot missed. Secondly, you can try a free optimizer called CCleaner, which you can find at: http://www.ccleaner.com/ This does a good job of cleaning up items that can make your PC run slower, and also recovers drive space. If you use CCleaner, please carefully review the settings - you may want to make some adjustments or it will clear some settings you might want to keep...like your IE history, or "last files" accessed in Word, Excel, etc. With any software that will make changes to your system, read the instructions carefully to make sure you understand what it will do before proceeding. Good luck - hope the above is helpful to you!
Hey Wolf, with speed problems (and Dells especially) it helps a lot when you tell us the O/S, and how much memory your running. To get that is real simple, right click on the "My Computer" icon and click "properties" . Dells website will not provide data on it's models without a serial number so I can't go there to find out what a 2400 has for hardware. One thing you can do is evaluate the items in the system tray. Each icon is a program that starts when your PC starts. If your sys tray looks like a kids picture book than you've got to much booting for the resources of the PC, and it will take forever. Start by right clicking those icons and finding the choice to stop it from running at bootup. That can be difficult because a lot of the crap people load is intentionaly setup to occupy you PC at boot and reoprt data via web connection in the background. They tell you their going to do it, but most people miss that because they don't "READ" the license agreement. I wanted it yesterday, I'm getting it now, just load !!!! I can't wait any longer PC society. After deciding which icons to ditch in the Sys Tray. Download Hijackthis and run it. Run the "scan & log" file and post that text file in here. We can then look at what's slowing you down. http://www.majorgeeks.com/Trend_Micro_HijackThis_d5554.html
Thanks for all the info. I have run countless spayware programs and gone into my startup and services under msconfig and and stopped everything "I think" is non-essential but I am no expert that is for sure. DD, I cannot get a screen shot of my o/s but it reads: WW XP Home Edition Version 2002 Service Pack 2 Dell Dimension DIM2400 Intel (R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz 2.39 GHz, 256 MB of RAM
Well I did the ewido and ccleaner but to no avial. Still taking forever to go from the intial startup to opening up IE7. But I did notice a faster time between url's that I go too.
To make mine start up faster I typed in msconfig into 'run' in the start menu. On the Start Up tab I unchecked the things I don't need at start up. Like messenger, the weather thingy I have... Unnecessary stuff. Now: Don't take my advice with out asking some one who knows what I'm talking about first. LOL 99% of the time I know just enough to get into trouble. Some one else can probably explain it a lot better. :neutral:
i would say your ram probably has alot to do with it. you have good specs on everything but that. I would recommend at least 512, or what i really recommend is 1 gig. you'll see it start up faster, and just generally run faster with everything else too. http://www.newegg.com/Store/Category.aspx?Category=17&name=Memory check them out, you wont find it much cheaper anywhere else, you could get 1 gig of memory for under 75 bucks.
The ram is kinda low for XP and 512 wouldn't hurt. Without actually being on your PC I would now look for a rootkit. That's a spyware that hides itself from your O/S and prety much all spyware removal programs. It's the new wave of spyware. Here's a link to AVG's rootkit revealer. Download it and run it. See what it finds? After you run it copy down "all" it finds and post it here. Don't do a FIX. It may find some files that are ok but doesn't know and we can tell the diff for you. Then you can go back run it again and then delete the list we give you. http://www.majorgeeks.com/AVG_Anti-Rootkit_d5249.html
ddrdan, I love your Avatar! I married one so that I can always be assured of free PC advice! :mrgreen:
I wanted to put, "You want to be my friend because I work on laptops, HUH?" but my wife said that sounded like a strippers avatar. :lol: :lol: :lol:
I think that is a great idea and it actually can help. I would also start up in safe mode and check for issues. Some spyware "hides" and can be deleted in safe mode.
