Slow startup- slow everything.

[Guest]

Win XP HE SP2. Dell 8300 3.0 Ghz .
PC takes minutes from startup to desktop. All programs much slower than
usual.
I regularly use Defrag, Have Microsoft anti spyware, Panda anti virus, Ad
Aware Spybot, System Mechanic Pro.etc.Have tried everything! Any advice?
Thanks.

 

[Alias]

How much RAM do you have?

Alias

 

[lvee]

There are a couple of other things you can do to speed up performance.
Run a disk cleanup, which will among other things, empty you IE temp files,
which can take up space. You can also purge all restore points, or al but
the most recent.
You can also check what's loading at startup by going to start/run type in
msconfig Then click the startup tab, and uncheck anything you don't need to
run at startup.
From your IE toolbar ( assuming that you use IE )go to tools, Options,
shoot I can't remember what to do from there, I don't use IE anymore, but
look for temp files folders and cookies, delete them, if there are any left
after running disk cleanup.

 

[Guest]

1536 Mb. 200 Gb. HD

How much RAM do you have?

Alias

 

[R. McCarty]

Use MSConfig.Exe to list your Startups & Watchdogs. The only
issue I see in your listing is "System Mechanic Pro". Have you used
it lately to Clean up ? Which Firewall do you use ?

 

[Guest]

Ivee,
All you mentioned is done regularly by System Mechanic Pro. I have re-run
them and it makes no difference.

 

[Guest]

System Mechanic Pro used almost daily. Firewall is Panda.

 

[R. McCarty]

Thanks for the follow-up info. In cases like yours, I would first boot
to Safe Mode and monitor it's time. If it (SM) functions correctly w/
a 30-50 second time then it's not hardware or OS related. Next I
would create a new user profile and try that in Normal boot mode.
If that works within a reasonable time frame then your issue is a
profile specific one and you'll have to do some more detective work
to run down the cause.

 

[Uncle John]

How "slow" is your slow start-up? If your system has many services enabled,
start up can often take over two minutes even on a fast machine with fast
disks. Start up speed is significantly affected by disk speed since all your
processes have to be loaded from disk. I noticed a dramatic improvement when
I replaced 7K disks with 10K disks from the same manufacturer. Hence slow
performance may be an indication that you need to defrag your disk.

As to System Mechanic, it is a powerful tool that needs to be used with care
and not too often, it can damage performance. It is definitely not good idea
to schedule it for regular unattended operation. You need to reboot and test
your system after using it. It is not a sufficient tool for removing all
malware, as well as anti-adware, anti-spyware and anti-virus run Spybot
Search& Destroy once a week.

Let us know if you are able to improve your performance and if so what you
did.

 

[Guest]

A couple of other things to try:

1) Search for *.tmp files and delete them. Sometimes they may be 0k in size
and can be located in directories other than the usual temp folders.

2) If you have a bunch of fonts, uninstall some that aren't used often.
Sometimes a corrupted font can cause problems. There a quite a few differing
opinions on this. Search the technical articles, but it helped me.

Hope it might help,
PGIL