laptop is very slow

[Unknown]

Have you run Disk Cleanup? control panel---accessories---system tools.

 

[Guest]

I think that I have enough info from this thread now. I found myself writing
the below, and realised I had become more involved with the thread than the
problem!

Thanks for all your help

Reinstall scheduled for Sat 22 Sep.

Have you run Disk Cleanup? contrrol panel---accessories---system tools.

Doh! I should have realized that Microsoft kept things secret and only by
paying bucks to someone else would help.
I have defragged and tried to tidy up the registry, I am probably savvy
enough to know that I shouldn't have a ton of .tmp files etc. hanging about.
Thanks for the help though. (BTW, 'accessories' is not available from my
control panel, I get to it from 'All Programs')
(Sammysweet: it's 'unnecessary', not 'unneccesary')

 

[Unknown]

"All programs" is correct. My brain was in first gear when I typed that.

 

[bbunny]

Hi

My partner has a Dell inspiron l6000 laptop
1.3GHz Intell celeron processor
248 Mb RAM
(Information gleaned from 'My Computer' properties)

It takes about 12 minutes to restart.
These are the timings:
(times are when the stated display goes from Click restart)
Desktop 15 seconds
'Windows is logging off' 33 s
'Saving your settings' 43 s
'Windows is shutting down' 1m 15s
Black screen, then Dell Blue bar startuo 1m 24s
Windows XP rolling blue bar 3m 17s
Black screen 3m 53s
'Windows is starting up' 4m 06s
Welcome 3m 39s
Blue screen 5m 37s
Desktop loads, spybot Teatimer messages 8m 40s
MSMessenger loads 9m 27s
DEsktop fulluy loaded, drive nor spinning 11m 52s

At startup:

MSN messenger live
Spybot teatimer
AVG
Epson printer thing
Sygate personal firewall
FreeRam XPpro
BBC new alerter
Scotty winPatrol

(there's a whole new thread about whether these are good / bad /redundant
/
obsolete programs, let's not go there now please

The example of the restart is indicative of a general sluggishness in the
machine performance. For example it takes 35s to bring up Firefox.

Is it normal for it to take this time? It seems to have gone a lot slower
over time (I reckon we've had the machine about 2 years), but I can't
identify any particular thing which has slowed it down.

I've done the obvious stuff like defragging, making sure that windows is
managing the virtual memory, even messing with the graphics options (let
windows choose what's best for me)


I am a bit wary about doing a reinstall as I don't know if that would fix
the problem. I have backed up all the data on the PC but rteformatting
just
feels really scary.

a) Not enough RAM.
b) Start these applications when you use them not on start up.