Whats happening here ?

[Andy100]

I am having the following problems with my Windows XP (WinXP Pro, 620RAM,
Athlon 2200XP, 80Gb HD).

The symptoms are as follows:
1. Sluggish start up, after putting in the password (WinXP) it takes about 5
minutes for the PC to settle down, i.e. the red 'busy' light flickers for 5
minutes and the mouse cursor moves very choppy until the light has gone off.
2. The welcome sound when i start up is also very choppy.
3. I cannot identify why the PC is 'busy' in Task Manager, i have also tried
other software to see if i can identify what is running at start up, i also
did a 'msconfig.exe' no clues there either.
4. Sometimes when i close a folder i find my desktop icons have disappeared
and the 'busy' light flashes, then the icons refresh and come back on after
10 seconds or so.
5. If i play an mp3 everything sounds ok until i open another program,
depending on how 'hungry' that software is, my mp3s start playing very
'choppy'

I have tried lots of spyware/adware programs with no luck. Does this sound
like a memory leak and if so, what can i do to remedy this.

Please Help !

Cheers
Andy

 

[Guest]

I am having the following problems with my Windows XP (WinXP Pro, 620RAM,
Athlon 2200XP, 80Gb HD).

The symptoms are as follows:
1. Sluggish start up, after putting in the password (WinXP) it takes about 5
minutes for the PC to settle down, i.e. the red 'busy' light flickers for 5
minutes and the mouse cursor moves very choppy until the light has gone off.
2. The welcome sound when i start up is also very choppy.
3. I cannot identify why the PC is 'busy' in Task Manager, i have also tried
other software to see if i can identify what is running at start up, i also
did a 'msconfig.exe' no clues there either.

Give Autostart Viewer a go
(http://www.diamondcs.com.au/index.php?page=asviewer) It goes way beyond
MSConfig in providing you insight.

 

[Guest]

There are many many things you can do to improve the overall performance of XP. One small note before I begin. The RAM you state as 620. It should be 640MB. Be sure to defrag or at least check the fragmentation level every week or so. Clean out temp files. Run chkdsk every month or so. Use a registry cleaner like RegCleaner or RegSeek. Empty the prefetch file every couple of months or so. Make sure you configure programs to only run when you need them. Turn off all "auto updates" including windows. Turn off the indexing service. Turn off the useless system restore and use the NT Backup instead, it's much better and much much more reliable. An excellent free program to get you started on optimizing the system for performance is SpeedXP. Don't use the "clear page file on shutdown" option. It will overwrite your pagefile with 0's before shutting down and that may add a lot of time to the shutdown. All the other settings are great. Turn off features like auto complete and the history garbage that XP keeps. XP-Antispy is a good free program that will make the changes for you. Beyond these basics I have made over 50 registry changes to get the most out of XP and give it stability. Oh ya, I almost forgot one of the most important things you can do, go to each manufacturers site for your hardware and get their latest drivers that are XP specific. start\run and type in msconfig and then click the startup tab and uncheck any programs you don't want starting when you boot. Then make sure you go into that programs configuration settings and turn off any "start with windows" feature. Since I have installed SP2 RC2 I do notice that windows takes a little longer to release the desktop to my control on a boot. But this is only for about 15-20 seconds or so. I believe it is due to the added security features that are included with SP2 but I'm still tracking this to verify. The icon issue may be a simple matter of tweaking the registry to increase your icon cache. Good luck. {:~)