I need help making my computer go faster. I have windows xp pro. and a whole gig if ram.?

Question

I have a whole gig of ram and almost nothing on my hard drive. I do updates and defrag i also scan for viruses and adware + spyware and it almost never finds anything and when it does i take care of the problem. I also check the hard drive for issues. I dont understand why it goes so slow. I was just wondering if anyone had any ideas to help me with this issue.

Answer 1

You did not say anything about the speed of your processor.

A useful exercise would to do dowload Mike Lin's startup control panel and see what is starting up on your computer. Disable everything except your antivirus software. It doesn't delete any software, just keeps it from stating up. If you disable something you later decide you need, you can check the box and it will start up the next time you reboot.

Answer 2

Hi there

There are a number of things that can be done to improve performance.

You can check your computer for spyware or adware by downloading a program to eliminate these threats.

If this doesn't help, you could try defragmenting your hard drive which will tidy up the files on your hard drive wihhc will enable your computer to access files faster. To defragment your hard drive, click your start button, go to all programs, go to accessories, then system tools and finally, disk defragmenter. Select the drive you wish to defragment and click the defragment button. This may take a while to complete, depending on your computer specifications.

Check your computer for viruses.

Hope this helps.

Scott

Answer 3

Working with a slow computer can be time consuming as programs/ applications take a long time to start. This problem is more pronounced in computers which have been used for 6 or more months. More information at http://fixit.in/slowcomputer.html

Answer 4

control your startup items, all those things that are in the task bar on the lower right or your screen. you can set for most of those not to start.

#1 you may still have a virus, if it was before your anti-virus sometimes it can hide from it. you would have to scan it across the network from another computer or from a CD.

#2 however more likely, its your registry, try registry mechanic
my dad's pc was running like a slug and I used that to find 1500 non critical errors in his registry. whats that mean, that they just made his pc slow but not unstable.

note a virus make you pc typically more unstable because it ties up resources.
registry errors typically do not, they just make your computer terribly inefficient.

Answer 5

The Athlon sixty 4 would have constrained ability at multi tasking, while a quad center like you've pronounced is provided for multi tasking. no longer purely swifter it will manage to doing stuff a 2.0gz athlon won't be able to. everywhere from 2 to 10 circumstances swifter.

Answer 6

most of ur "felt" speed is going to be in the harddrive ...going to a faster one like a 10000rpm raptor, or even better .. put 2,3,or4 of them in a raid array and load windows on it, will make it seem 20 times faster ... u also need to make sure ur timings are set ryt in bios settupand if u have a dual channel motherboard that u have only two sticks of ram and they are the same type and speed and its configured correctly in bios ... other than that, run hijack-this and see whats going on ...

Answer 7

Put flame stickers on your computer and make engine noises when you turn it on. That alone will add a few megahertz.

Answer 8

disable any unneeded window funcitons...find services.msc and pick whatever

Answer 9

http://bartman1.blogspot.com/ go here and follow if your computer runs slow