My System is running sluggish......

[stanz]

I have posted this to another XP help group. Sorry if this is not
allowed.

Hello: Need advice. I have a Dell 8300 running XP PRO, 1 Gig Memory,
SP3 (all Microsoft updates current) IE7, Firefox Release 7 is my
default browser. Not getting any error messages.

I have to do a system restart on a daily basis since after about 8-10
hours of browsing, playing casual games, the system performance get's
slower and slower to the point that I have to restart in order to get
some performance. Have scanned the system for adware, spyware,
viruses...etc., and nothing found. Have run a defrag, cleared out the
TEMP files, eliminated all unnecessary apps., hard drive is about 50%
full...etc. All drivers are up to date except for my Network adapter
and Graphics Driver (NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 (Microsoft
Corporation)...I have never updated a driver and am a bit hesitant,
since I have read that if the most current driver has (OEM) after if,
I need to get the latest driver from Dell, which I have found on the
Dell driver site. (Intell(R) PRO/100 VE Network Connection)

Could updating both these drivers help the browsing performance..??

The only thing I notice that even though the Web page seems to be
loaded to completion, the green loading circle (whatever it's called)
keeps on going and going until I physically stop the page, but this
does not happen on all pages. Some load quickly and stop.

I used the Troubleshooting info from Firefox and notices these two
messages:

WebGL RendererBlocked for your graphics driver version. Try updating
your graphics driver to version 257.21 or newer. GPU Accelerated
Windows0/4. Blocked for your graphics driver version. Try updating
your graphics driver to version 257.21 or newer.

Also states that the following :
Driver Version 5.6.7.3

From poking around the net, I am reading that my last resort is a full
clean install of XP PRO, SP2, SP3, (have all the disks) and all
updates have been downloaded from Microsoft, which appears like it
could take forever. I have done this one time a few years ago due to
a faulty hard drive, but it was prior to SP3.

Any suggestions are welcome....I am a casual user....no technical
expertise, so please keep the technical jargon to a minimum.

Thanks much....Stanz

 

[Paul]

I have posted this to another XP help group. Sorry if this is not
allowed.

Hello: Need advice. I have a Dell 8300 running XP PRO, 1 Gig Memory,
SP3 (all Microsoft updates current) IE7, Firefox Release 7 is my
default browser. Not getting any error messages.

I have to do a system restart on a daily basis since after about 8-10
hours of browsing, playing casual games, the system performance get's
slower and slower to the point that I have to restart in order to get
some performance. Have scanned the system for adware, spyware,
viruses...etc., and nothing found. Have run a defrag, cleared out the
TEMP files, eliminated all unnecessary apps., hard drive is about 50%
full...etc. All drivers are up to date except for my Network adapter
and Graphics Driver (NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 (Microsoft
Corporation)...I have never updated a driver and am a bit hesitant,
since I have read that if the most current driver has (OEM) after if,
I need to get the latest driver from Dell, which I have found on the
Dell driver site. (Intell(R) PRO/100 VE Network Connection)

Could updating both these drivers help the browsing performance..??

The only thing I notice that even though the Web page seems to be
loaded to completion, the green loading circle (whatever it's called)
keeps on going and going until I physically stop the page, but this
does not happen on all pages. Some load quickly and stop.

I used the Troubleshooting info from Firefox and notices these two
messages:

WebGL RendererBlocked for your graphics driver version. Try updating
your graphics driver to version 257.21 or newer. GPU Accelerated
Windows0/4. Blocked for your graphics driver version. Try updating
your graphics driver to version 257.21 or newer.

Also states that the following :
Driver Version 5.6.7.3

From poking around the net, I am reading that my last resort is a full
clean install of XP PRO, SP2, SP3, (have all the disks) and all
updates have been downloaded from Microsoft, which appears like it
could take forever. I have done this one time a few years ago due to
a faulty hard drive, but it was prior to SP3.

Any suggestions are welcome....I am a casual user....no technical
expertise, so please keep the technical jargon to a minimum.

Thanks much....Stanz

I occasionally get this from... an ISP problem.

If general system performance is normal (you open Microsoft word
and everything works normally there), but yet Internet specific
things are degraded, it's just possible the access mux at the
ISP has a problem.

I sometimes have to drop my ADSL session to the ISP, and start a new
one. That doesn't change the system state at my end, but tends to
"refresh" the DNS lookup response from the ISP. That sometimes
reduces the time seen with the "loading circle". If I can't get
pages to load in Firefox, that's what I do to cure it. I don't
have to do that very often.

*******

An enemy of WinXP, is memory fragmentation. If there is paging to
disk causes by some application you run, I find it can take an
inordinate amount of time to correct later. And that effect can
be stopped by loading the pagefile onto a RAMDisk, which makes
the unraveling process much faster (seamless almost). But in your
case, that is not a practical suggestion. It's just something
I've tested along the way. It's for people with an excess of
RAM they'd not normally be able to use (>4GB).

I find things like that sometimes happen, if doing very large
reads and writes. Back when I was editing a movie recorded from
my VCR, and the movie was around 110GB in size )uncompressed format),
reading and writing that would eventually slow the machine down.
It seemed to be a memory issue caused by a lot of file system
activity. A reboot, was what it took to fix it.

These are not necessarily things that get fixed by a reinstall.
A reinstall can only fix certain kinds of symptoms, not all of them.
Things that are genuine defects in an OS, can't be fixed by reinstalling.

*******

Note that, the built-in defragmenter in WinXP, isn't that good. What
you should see, is the partition fragments faster after a defrag, than
it does when the partition is new. I've not done a comparison of
all defragmenters, to see if the others are better at it. I have
a technique for correcting this, by copying the files off C:,
reformatting C, copying the files back, doing a "fixboot" from the
recovery console, and then I have the "perfect defrag". But again,
that is not a practical recommendation, as I have to boot a second
Windows OS, to be able to carry out such a recipe. I started doing
that, when I realized the 8+ hour defrag was taking longer, than
my 30 minute repair procedure. It's just faster to do it that way.
I've left the build-in defragmenter running overnight, only to find
the next day, it wasn't finished. So I gave up on it.

*******

As far as I'm aware, the only time you are advised not to update
a video driver, is on laptops. Some of those use "custom" drivers, to
account for the fact the LCD panel of the laptop, is not Plug and
Play. The laptop maker, may not offer graphics updates very often.

Another case, is on desktops, but its a situation where you've purchased
an AGP card that has a PCI Express GPU, and the Rialto bridge or
HSI bridge is being used. Cards like that, sometimes there is only
one driver version which works. The support situation on late model
AGP cards is poor to say the least. In such a case, you have to find
a forum or comment section, where the users have identified the location
of the sole working driver. Your FX5200 isn't in a mess like that. The
FX5200 is a real AGP or PCI card. The FX5200 is "native", nor bridged.

For desktop computers, I feel it's generally safe to get an update.
You'd already be aware of the driver situation, if you owned one of
those AGP cards with poor support, because it would have likely been
"broken" out of the box. Before buying an AGP card new now, check
the customer reviews for it on Newegg. They'll tell you where the
one good driver is.

Since you have an FX5200 on a desktop, you can go here.

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

Geforce
Geforce 5 FX Series
Windows XP
English

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_175.19_whql.html

Click the Supported Products tab. FX5200 is listed.

"... GeForce 5 FX series:
... FX 5200,"

So that download, at 36.8 MB, may bring you up to date. It
implies Nvidia has stopped doing driver updates for that
card for WinXP.

For example, if you check out a 6200 card and what driver
updates are available, you end up here. This is from 2011.10.24
and supports 6200. It's even possible, a driver like this
supports FX5200, but it's not in the list. Some guys know
how to fix stuff like that, but it is easier for me to
tell you to stick with the 175.19 one instead. (There are
people who know how to hack the driver, so it will install
older cards.) I don't feel that is necessary in this case,
and the 175.19 will be good enough. I have three FX5200's here,
and generally don't have driver problems with them. They
just suck performance wise But I was silly enough to buy
three of them, at different times.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp-285.58-whql-driver.html

The only time I'd personally consider a reinstall, is if
I severely broke something, and had no backup to restore from.
For example, back when I was using Win2K, I forgot to remove
the old video drivers. And one day, when I added a new video card
(about the fourth one for that machine), I couldn't get DirectX
to work any more. I tried lots of stuff, and it stubbornly
remained broken. At that point, reinstalling was the better
option. Because kicking the machine with my foot, costs
too much money

HTH,
Paul

 

[philo]

I have posted this to another XP help group. Sorry if this is not
allowed.

Hello: Need advice. I have a Dell 8300 running XP PRO, 1 Gig Memory,
SP3 (all Microsoft updates current) IE7, Firefox Release 7 is my
default browser. Not getting any error messages.

<snip>

run msconfig and take all unnecessary apps out of startup...
chances are , all you need there is your virus checker

 

[Char Jackson]

Hello: Need advice. I have a Dell 8300 running XP PRO, 1 Gig Memory,
SP3 (all Microsoft updates current) IE7, Firefox Release 7 is my
default browser. Not getting any error messages.

I have to do a system restart on a daily basis since after about 8-10
hours of browsing, playing casual games, the system performance get's
slower and slower to the point that I have to restart in order to get
some performance.

In addition to the other suggestions, right click on the Taskbar and
open Task Manager when the PC has been recently rebooted. Select the
Performance tab and make a mental note of the CPU Usage and PF Usage,
as well as their respective histories. I assume the CPU usage will be
quite low, since you aren't doing much at this point, and PF usage
will be well under 50%.

Minimize Task Manager and use your computer as you normally do. When
you notice it getting sluggish, bring up Task Manager again and
compare the current graphs, especially PF Usage, with what you saw
earlier. With only 1 Gigabyte of RAM, I expect PF Usage to be quite
high, perhaps to the point where Windows is swapping parts of memory
to disk. You'll see evidence of that if the hard drive activity LED is
on more than it's off. If that's happening, your computer will be very
sluggish, indeed.

By chance, if CPU Usage is at or near 100%, then you have a different
(or additional) problem in that one or more processes is sucking up
all of the CPU power. Switch to the Processes tab and click (twice) on
the CPU column to bring the pig to the top of the list. Once you see
what it is, you can decide what to do about it.

 

[Tim Meddick]

Have you really noticed whether it is jut the browser that is running
slow - or could it be, as you stated in the title you chose for your
thread, that the system itself is running slow?

Do other programs exhibit a similar "sluggishness" to respond - i.e.;
Windows Explorer taking a long time to display folder contents?

If this is the case, then start the "Windows Task Manager" (right-click on
an empty area of the taskbar and choose "Task Manager") then re-arrange the
list in order of "Mem Usage" (by clicking on the heading of that name) so
that the greatest users of memory are at the top.

You will then be able to see, at any given moment, which processes are
contributing to low system resources, leading to slowness in the
functionality of both applications and the browser's ability to display
network data.

On the other hand, if the slowness is limited only to the loading of
Internet content (such as; Internet Explorer's loading times and/or Media
Player, when playing online radio), then there are a few things you can do
to speed-up your Internet connection...

The 3rd-party application; "The TCP Optimizer", is a [freeware] utility
that enables the user to understand and manage, simply, a number of network
settings that otherwise would be baffling to the average user (like me),
and, in so doing, optimize the connection...

You can download the stand-alone application by clicking on the link below
: -

TCP Optimizer - Speedguide.net
http://www.speedguide.net/files/TCPOptimizer.exe

==

Cheers, Tim Meddick, Peckham, London.

 

[BillW50]

Note that, the built-in defragmenter in WinXP, isn't that good. What
you should see, is the partition fragments faster after a defrag, than
it does when the partition is new. I've not done a comparison of
all defragmenters, to see if the others are better at it. I have
a technique for correcting this, by copying the files off C:,
reformatting C, copying the files back, doing a "fixboot" from the
recovery console, and then I have the "perfect defrag". But again,
that is not a practical recommendation, as I have to boot a second
Windows OS, to be able to carry out such a recipe. I started doing
that, when I realized the 8+ hour defrag was taking longer, than
my 30 minute repair procedure. It's just faster to do it that way.
I've left the build-in defragmenter running overnight, only to find
the next day, it wasn't finished. So I gave up on it.

Back in the MFM hard drive days, defragging hard drives was really
wonderful. As I saw the disk speed easily double. But when MFM was
replaced by IDE drives back in the early 90's, defragging may cut down
on head arm noise. But I never saw any speed improvement. Well tops was
like 1% and to me not worth the trouble.

I believe the real bottleneck is the bus and the interface and not the
seek time. And Windows (NT family) does a pretty good job of not
fragmenting files normally anyway. It still does, but only when it can't
find enough continuous space.

Many people have argued with me about my personal experience. And I
don't doubt that they believe defragging really helps. I don't know for
sure if it does speed up their system for real or not. All I know is how
I use a computer, it doesn't for me.

Yes I too clone by files and folder method too. And backup that way
sometimes too. But this method sometimes break things. Like Works on my
Asus EeePC machines (no I don't use it, but I don't want it broken
either). Also some applications lose keys and I have to reenter them all
over again.

 

[Don Phillipson]

Hello: Need advice. I have a Dell 8300 running XP PRO, 1 Gig Memory,
SP3 (all Microsoft updates current) IE7, Firefox Release 7 is my
default browser. Not getting any error messages.

I have to do a system restart on a daily basis since after about 8-10
hours of browsing, playing casual games, the system performance get's
slower and slower to the point that I have to restart in order to get
some performance. Have scanned the system for adware, spyware,
viruses...etc., and nothing found.

More RAM memory seems the cheapest likely solution.
The size of your PAGEFILE.SYS may be a clue.
Repost results here.

 

[stanz]

I have posted this to another XP help group.  Sorry if this is not
allowed.

Hello:  Need advice.  I have a Dell 8300 running XP PRO, 1 Gig Memory,
SP3 (all Microsoft updates current) IE7, Firefox Release 7 is my
default browser.  Not getting any error messages.

I have to do a system restart on a daily basis since after about 8-10
hours of browsing, playing casual games, the system performance get's
slower and slower to the point that I have to restart in order to get
some performance.  Have scanned the system for adware, spyware,
viruses...etc., and nothing found.  Have run a defrag, cleared out the
TEMP files, eliminated all unnecessary apps., hard drive is about 50%
full...etc. All drivers are up to date except for my Network adapter
and Graphics Driver (NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200  (Microsoft
Corporation)...I have never updated a driver and am a bit hesitant,
since I have read that if the most current driver has (OEM) after if,
I need to get the latest driver from Dell, which I have found on the
Dell driver site. (Intell(R) PRO/100 VE Network Connection)

Could updating both these drivers help the browsing performance..??

The only thing I notice that even though the Web page seems to be
loaded to completion, the green loading circle (whatever it's called)
keeps on going and going until I physically stop the page, but this
does not happen on all pages.  Some load quickly and stop.

I used the Troubleshooting info from Firefox and notices these two
messages:

WebGL RendererBlocked for your graphics driver version. Try updating
your graphics driver to version 257.21 or newer. GPU Accelerated
Windows0/4. Blocked for your graphics driver version. Try updating
your graphics driver to version 257.21 or newer.

Also states that the following :
Driver Version 5.6.7.3

From poking around the net, I am reading that my last resort is a full
clean install of XP PRO, SP2, SP3, (have all the disks) and all
updates have been downloaded from Microsoft, which appears like it
could take forever.  I have done this one time a few years ago due to
a faulty hard drive, but it was prior to SP3.

Any suggestions are welcome....I am a casual user....no technical
expertise, so please keep the technical jargon to a minimum.

Thanks much....Stanz

Well..Thanks to all who gave me advice, but nothing I tried helped to
resolve the slow degradation of the
system performance. I appears that I will have to start to scratch
and reload XP PRO, and possibly add another 1 GIG of Memory for a
total of 2 GiGs.

Again...Thanks to all and the very best to all in 2012...

Stanz