XP Family Room Powerhouse

[Guest]

Any help on this subject would be appreciated. Please keep in mind I am not
a computer expert. We just purchased a Dell Dimension 3000 with XP Home
Edition. I absolutely hate this thing called the "family room powerhouse".
We have 4 users on our computer, and if someone forgets to log off, or leaves
a program running it slows everything down for everyone else.

Secondly, going through the powerhouse, when the desktop screen opens all
the same programs load again, even if another user had previously logged on.
Getting to the desktop screen seems to take forever. When we had Windows 98
everything was so much faster.

My questions
1) Can we set this up so that we function with only (1) desktop screen?
That way we don't have to go through the family room powerhouse each time.
2) How else can we speed this thing up, we are so dissappointed with the
slow speed?

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

(e-mail address removed)

 

[Guest]

Typically leaving programs running on other accounts shouldn't slow it down
"too" much. Yes those programs are using memory, but if you have enough
memory it should be okay (or Windows will page it to the virtual memory file
while another user is switched on). In addition, most of the programs that
get left on are probably not using much processor resources, since they're
not likely to be activly computing anything while they're not being used.
But I am certian it's a memory issue (Windows XP, let's face it, works best
with at least 1GB, and I bet your system doesn't have that). So you'd need
more RAM to take advantage of the multiple user features.

You can indeed turn off those features. You can have multple users, but
disable switching between them (forcing one to log off before another logs
on) or you can choose to only use one profile. That's your choice, and
should have the same performance since only one will be logged on at a time.

Just open up User Accounts in the control panel, go to "Change the way users
log on or off" and then disable Fast User Switching.

 

[Tom [Pepper] Willett]

Is this a media center version of WinXP?
If so, you may wish to ask the experts in the Windows Media Center
newsgroup.

Tom

 

[Guest]

Probably memory. No way does this machine have 1GB. I will look into adding
additional RAM. Thanks for your help.