Windows speed decreasing

[John]

Greetings:

I have a Dell D800 laptop with 512MB of 594MHz RAM and a 1.7GHz Pentium M
processor running XP Home version 2002 Service Pack 2.

My computer has become increasingly sluggish over the past year, to the
point where it takes several seconds for the screen to redraw/execute after a
menu item choice. It can take up to a minute or more to launch most
applications, and memory intensive applications (eg Solidworks, LabView, etc)
can take several minutes to launch.

I'm running Norton NIS 2008 and it shows no virus, trojans, etc. I have
turned on indexing in hopes of reducing overhead. Any ideas on what's going
on and how to correct?

Thanks.

John

 

[Unknown]

When was the last time you ran disc cleanup?

 

[R. McCarty]

Norton ( anything ) will cause performance loss. That aside, you may
have a combination of issues. Over time a drive becomes fragmented.
Defragmenting will help to restore performance as a disk drive is the
single slowest component of any PC. The built-in defragmenter is OK
but you may want to consider either JKDefrag or Raxco's Perfect Disk.

Also performance loss can be due to a drive being in an inconsistent
state or Dirty. A chkdsk C will let you know if the disk volume needs
correction. To make corrections will require calling Chkdsk with a
/F or /R qualifier. DO NOT run Chkdsk with either fix or repair unless
your data is backed up.

Again on Norton, it's not very effective - you may have infections that
are being passed over by it. I'd recommend you use two on-line scans to
check your system
http://www.eset.com/onlinescan/
http://www.ewido.net/en/onlinescan/

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Have you defragmented the hard drive recently?