Sluggish Performance in XP Home

[Mike Shvarts]

Hi there,
A friend of mine is running an August 2001 Gateway
Performance 1300, XP Home system, Pentium 4 1.3GHz, 256MB
of PC800 RAM, 20GB Hard drive(FAT32), and recently, his
computer's response has become completely unacceptable.
Doing anything, from logging in to even loading IE6
requires an inordinate amount of time, especially when
compared to my Pentium II 333. I was just wondering, given
this situation, what could I do to speed it up back to its
original state? He does install a lot of programs, but I
checked and most of them don't have any adverse effect on
the system. Though SP1 isn't installed, I'd say a lot of
security updates were installed, perhaps 20. I have
cleared all the temp files on the system, run Ad-aware and
Spybot, cleared the HKLM and HKLU RUN keys, and a few
other tweaks, but nothing speeds it up. Speeddisk had
little effect as well. I tried to install XP SP1a, but
that too, took so much time that we just gave up. Any
comments or suggestions would really be appreciated. This
problem has really been bugging me, and we'd like to fix
it without having to reformat.
Thanks in advance,
Mike Shvarts
(e-mail address removed)

 

[aragorn]

I had the same problem..finally formatted and reinstalled
after 1 1/2 years of install and uninstalling programs.
Now it RUNS again! The registry went from 55MB to only
20MB. It was a lot of work to reconfigure everything...but
worth it.
Good luck though

 

[aragorn]

Convert the drive to NTFS and see if it makes a difference.
I've noticed the Defrag takes only a few secondes compared
to the FAT system.

 

[Jupiter Jones [MVP]]

Mike;
See if this link helps:
http://www3.telus.net/dandemar/Slowcom.htm