crawling computer

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Guest

You guys have helped me with the first problem but now that I had to use sons
computer I cannot believe how slow his is! He is a wanna be tech geek with a
crawling computer!
He runs IE and Mozilla. He does have alot of music on it in a shared folder
to share with me and his brother. It is a new Dell with 40G harddrive and I
believe it is the 4700 if that helps.
Anyway to get it up and walking and maybe even running again?
Thanks!
 
Young people and a lot of music. Hmmmm..

Most times, I find when a computer is very slow, it is due to a number of
programs running in the background. Of course this could be spyware, adware
etc. and a thorough malware scan is certainly appropriate.

When you know the system is clean, check for other background applications.
Some examples to look for:

What anti-virus are you using? Norton is notorious (nortonious?) for slowing
down a system. I normally recommend AVG or AVAST. Both are free to home user
and do an excellent job. And Zone Alarm is a good choice for Firewall.

Be careful what other programs load up whenever you boot the computer. MSN
Messenger and other CHAT programs, QuickTime, RealPlayer and other MUSIC
Players, Adobe, MS Office, P2P clients like Kaza and eDonkey, Video and
Sound card utilities, and many other softwares insist on adding startup
entries to your system.

Somehow they seem to think that just because you installed their program -
you *must* want it to run each time, every time, whenever your computer is
powered up. The only thing this actually does for you is slows down your
machine. When you *want* to use any of these programs, just start them
manually. You don't need all this crap starting automatically. And I would
almost bet that this is the reason your machine is so sluggish. Also, make
sure that "indexing" services are not running such as "Find Fast" in Control
Panel or Windows XP Drive Indexing. And if you have any kind of "Anti-Crash"
software - get rid of it!

There are many tools available to help you control startup programs. If you
have Spybot (and you should) - one of the Advanced tools is a startup
manager.

The next thing to check is the hardware. Be sure to defrag the hard drive as
this could speed things up a bit. You didn't mention how much RAM is
installed or what video card is there. If the Video is built into the
Motherboard - some of the system RAM is reserved for its use. A RAM or
Video card upgrade could be beneficial. CPU speed can also be an issue but,
a newer system should be adequate.

So, there's a few ideas.
 
Well if the 40 gig drive is nearly full of mp3's then the windows swap file
will not function correctly slowing things down.
Free up some space or get a larger hard drive.
 
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