XP is slowing down

[Vidyaranya]

HI Guys,

My Windows XP machine (Intel PIII/866MHz) has all the
latest (critcal and recommended) patches, latest antivirus
updates, spybot and regclean checked, has 256 MB RAM with
RAM defragmenter, plenty of hard-disk space recently
defragged, has all unnecessary services disabled and
minimum programs in startup but still, both the startup
and application response is very slow. I did a boot
logging mode start up and got a ntbtlog.txt file which
shows a list of drivers loaded and not loaded. How can I
use this file to find out why my machine is slowing down
or any idea as to what else can I do to speed up my
machine.

Thanks in advance

 

[davetest]

HI Guys,

My Windows XP machine (Intel PIII/866MHz) has all the
latest (critcal and recommended) patches, latest antivirus
updates, spybot and regclean checked, has 256 MB RAM with
RAM defragmenter, plenty of hard-disk space recently
defragged, has all unnecessary services disabled and
minimum programs in startup but still, both the startup
and application response is very slow. I did a boot
logging mode start up and got a ntbtlog.txt file which
shows a list of drivers loaded and not loaded. How can I
use this file to find out why my machine is slowing down
or any idea as to what else can I do to speed up my
machine.

Thanks in advance

The best analysis of boot time performance is with
bootvis. It's graphs out the details very nicely.

I have 256MB myself with an Athlon 1.2 Ghz. In general
I find the system very responsive.
if you open the task manager/performance tab, how much memory
is typically available? You should check it at different times
to get a feel for the average.

Dave

 

[Guest]

-----Original Message-----

The best analysis of boot time performance is with
bootvis. It's graphs out the details very nicely.

I have 256MB myself with an Athlon 1.2 Ghz. In general
I find the system very responsive.
if you open the task manager/performance tab, how much memory
is typically available? You should check it at different times
to get a feel for the average.

Dave
.

Thanks Dave

Physical Memory Total 260596, Available 189296, system
cache 30108 and PF usage 181 MB. Kernel Memory Total
51708, paged 38120, nonpaged 13588, Commit Charge (K)
Total 184972, Limit 640240, Peak 444936. This is about
average on any day. Will try bootvis.

Thanks once again.

 

[Alex Nichol]

Physical Memory Total 260596, Available 189296, system
cache 30108 and PF usage 181 MB. Kernel Memory Total
51708, paged 38120, nonpaged 13588, Commit Charge (K)
Total 184972, Limit 640240, Peak 444936. This is about
average on any day.

Those are normal enough, even light for a 256 MB machine. Read up on
memory management at www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm.

Bootvis is not going to help that much - it will optimise boot, but that
does not necessarily optimise load of later programs, which is done
better by the Prefetch facility that normally runs every three days in a
quiet few minutes. Note that this needs the Task Scheduler to be
working (and so does System Restore) even though it shows no scheduled
tasks. So in Control Panel - Scheduled tasks, click Advanced and it
that has 'Start Using' click it so it says 'Stop using'

Defragment the disk

And look for things that might be consuming time - the indexing service
for one.