Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Helping your Technotard friends and relatives

Looking for help.

You all know I'm basically a generalist; I speak "geek" but I'm not nearly as tech savvy as many of you. Nevertheless, I am certainly the alpha geek in my family and in many other circles.

I need to help a dear friend with a "slow" computer. It's a ~3 YO XP machine. That's all I know.

I'll be running the following, but would love any other tips you care to provide:

PC Decrapifier
Startup Inspector
Ad-Aware
Spybot S&D

Will also be invoking Firefox instead of IE and Avast! instead of anything that might be currently installed. And uninstalling all kinds of stuff, I'm sure.

Grateful for any general suggestions.

I would go with MalwareBytes over Spybot, myself, for general removal. We also use CacheCleaner at work. Check the amount of RAM--having 2GB would help a great deal, and that should be pretty cheap right now.

If the hard drive's full, that could also be problematic.

Thank you, Ken.

Check out Smart Defrag 1.40 as well. It has some scheduling features and it's easy to use.

I'd guess with certainty the HD has never been touched.

I've been really happy with SuperAntiSpyware. It wants to install itself into your startup items, but you can skip that and run it manually. The free version does everything you need.

http://www.superantispyware.com/

Replace it with a new Windows7 machine. Or even better, a Mac. Problem solved.

Seriously though, +1 to all of the suggestions you've already received.

RAM is a good idea. I've known many "slow" XP machines that came with only 256 or 512MB of RAM. If this is the case with your friend's PC, upgrade that memory if the motherboard supports it. 1GB is good, 2GB is better. Makes a world of difference with XP, and the cost and time involved to upgrade RAM is usually trivial.

Tom,

Definitely look at upgrading the Ram first - XP home uses about 700MB of ram without anything else running once all the security patches have been applied. This is really cheap and easy to do and can give a couple more years life to an old machine.

I am finding more and more problems with common antivirus tools slowing windows machines down. It seems the most popular AV tools get targeted by the virus writers. Try some of the free ones like avira and a firewall.

Try opening up task manager and finding the processes using the most CPU. Google the Process name and see what comes up.

Failing that, a full rebuild every once and a while of a windows machine is a sure fire way of speeding things up.

If it was a Mac, I would really recommend getting an SSD drive put it. I just did this for my wifes mac, and it takes less time to startup/shutdown than our Plasma TV does. I don't recommend this yet for Windows as the Operating systems are heavily geared to older hard disk drives, which can be problematic. This is meant to be solved with Windows 7.

I would also check the to see what's running at start up. It's amazing how many programs feel it's their right to add an automatic start up with Windows.
Click the Start button, then Run, and type msconfig in the box then hit enter. Click the Startup tab and see what has a check mark. XP really doesn't need much running. If in doubt, Google the Startup item.

Thank you again, gentlemen. I was already hip to most of that, but certainly appreciate the affirmation and reminders!

The time/beer relationship is hopelessly inadequate for me to rebuild this machine.

I already suggested he get a Mac. No sale at this time. Will definitely look at the RAM.

Another tool I like is to initiate dxdiag from the Run prompt. Nice, concise snapshot of what you've got to work with.

Thank you so much for your time and expertise!

That's great philosophy Tom: There's a time and a beer for everything!

Oh my. I just got roped into doing something similar. At least I'm getting paid for it.

Problem solved.

Compaq crapware + HP MFD + Norton.

Still need a memory upgrade, too.

REALLY appreciate the help!

If you're going the memory route, check out NewEgg.com. At the very least, to get a feel for what your friend will need. They have a pretty good memory configuration tool that can help you figure out exactly what kind of RAM his PC was designed to use.

They are my go-to online retailer for computer hardware. Especially for RAM and hard drives. Their selection is incredible, their prices are among the lowest, and their shipping is usually speedy (pay the $1.99 for expedited shipping). At least, in my experiences.

Good luck!

Glad to hear you found the problem so quickly.

I was going to suggest that sometimes, rather than going through all of the great troubleshooting and 'cleaning' suggestions above that it is sometimes just easier to back up the data, format and start fresh and clean.

I like to do this at least every 2nd year or so and I find I always end up with a much faster machine than when I try to 'clean it up'. I keep a pretty tight ship via regular usage of the above techniques anyways but I find a clean start is still the best medicine after a while.

Depends on your usage, habits and fear of the format command though. It's not for everyone.

Yes, Peter, I don't know what I'd do without Newegg. They are the best. Fortunately, the Compaq support page was actually pretty helpful in specifying the RAM (184 pin SDRAM PC3200, up to 4x1GB - currently 2x256MB).

I think RAM has gone up in price over the last ~6 months. Did anybody else notice that?

This is not the first time I've had trouble with the software HP provides to go along with their all-in-ones.

I would classify myself as less savvy than Tom - maybe "Pidgen Geek". There are things in my startup that I do not want there. To remove is it as easy as unchecking the boxes?

msconfig is more of a debugging tool. It does disable the item from starting, but it not supposed to be considered a permanent solution. Running the tool again may end up re-enabling programs. The only real way to stop the stuff is to remove their start entries from the registry, with all the caveats that entails. So, yeah, msconfig will work for the most part, just be sure to check from time to time that everything you want disabled is still disabled.

Chris,
How do you remove the entries from the registry?

First you need to start the Registry Editor, by running regedit.

The following is from memory, I'm not on a Windows machine right now to verify.

There are two sets of Run keys in the registry. They are located in both the HKEY Current User, and HKEY Local Machine. Under those go to Software, Microsoft, Windows, Current Version, Run. In the Run folder you'll find the entries for each process which will be started with the machine. Remove the ones you don't wish to have start.

Messing in the Registry without knowing what you're doing will quickly make your machine inoperable, with the only method of repair being to reinstall Windows. That's the caveat of which I spoke.

I've had pretty good luck with Startup Inspector for Windows.

Speaking of helping relatives with electronics, my dad had my go over to my grandparents house the other day to hook up a DVD/VCR combo player.

He spent a couple of hours trying to figure it out and couldn't get it to work!

He is obviosuly not the techno geek in the family.

David, don't break the news to him just yet. It could be devastating?

Given the ominous quality of Chris's e-mail ie "inoperable" would I be better off with the Inspector - and if so is it fairly intuitive?

Well, I personally prefer not to manually edit the registry. I think startup inspector is very intuitive. It has never misbehaved when I have used it. YMMV.

Is Startup Instructor a freeware download or something you have to purchase?

It's freeware (donate if you like/use it)

http://www.windowsstartup.com/startupinspector.php

C'mon, hack the registry. Whats the worst that could happen?

I actually took a training class about the windows registry -- probably in 2000 -- and haven't feared it since. It's not so bad. Like any major city, though, there are parts you want to steer clear of...

I agree. Changing keys related to applications will only break an application. I mostly stay away from O/S stuff.

Thanks, Tom. I will be using it mostly on my Father-in-Law's computer.