Help me get my work pc up to speed

[camaro]

I have a HP d325 at work and it has a XP2400+, but it's soooo slow. I mean it feels like my old P233. Some computer illiterate had it before me and there was a ton of spyware on here and I had popups ever few seconds even though nothing was open.

So first I deleted IE. I like Mozilla anyway. But instead of the popups I get script errors. Just as annoying. Obviously it's trying to open up pop ups in IE, which doesn't exist now. Need help getting rid of that.

Second I need help getting this PC to run like a XP2400 should. What can be slowing it down so much? I checked the CPU usage and it's low, but it takes so long to run anything. 33 processes running now.

Thanks for your help.

[thronka]

You need to get rid of that spyware. I recommend wiping the drive and reinstalling everything from scratch. That way you can get better speed from all that spyware gone. IF you dont want to reload everything, then just download AdAware and scan for the spyware and delete all the spyware. I dunno if that will help very much considering the condition the pc is in now.

[John Prophet]

youve got to turn off some of the "junk".

One thing is the extra "eye candy"...all the video stuff like scrolling menus and shadows under drop boxes etc....I usually leave shadows under the icons etc but I turn off most of that list.

I cant remember where those settigns are off the top of my head but someone else will chime in.



Also, there are lots of services running on there that dont need to be...gay stuff like "alerter" "BITS" "portable media serial number" "wireless zero configuration".....a whole long list of stuff taking up resources for no reason...so you need to turn the extra junk off.

go here http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm and check it out....I pretty much use his "safe" config on my xp machines....but I leave system restore on which he turns off.

Anyway, that is a good way to give it a lil more snap.

JP

[eagle1]

First download spyware software like SpyBot and AdAware.
Also, the machine could be slow because of the hard drive.
Have you defragged recently?
Do you have a lot of installed programs that you don't even use?
How much RAM does the system has?
To run XP at really good speeds it doesn't matter if you have an AMD64, RAM is very very important. I recommend at least 256 but preferably 512MB Ram.

It could just be that the hard disk is a slow 5400 rpm one.
Check BIOS settings also.

[camaro]

I run Adaware everyday. How can I get rid of the IE popups? Something is still installed somewhere and I can't find it.

[camaro]

Oh man I just checked and it has only 112MB of RAM. I think I might bring some sticks from home I don't use.

[eagle1]

Well... that's one of the problems.
For XP, you will need double or triple that!!

Also,

I run Adaware everyday. How can I get rid of the IE popups? Something is still installed somewhere and I can't find it.

Try and run msconfig (Start->Run -msconfig) and disable from the startup tab what you think is weird (i.e. non system things).

[Starfury_2260]

obviously if the computer is full of junk the best solution would be to backup important files and format and reinstall.

[John Prophet]

112mb?

sounds like 128 with 16 given over to the shared video....one quick thing you can do is go into the bios and change the shared amount from 16 down to 4 or 2 or whatever the lowest thing is.

Then make sure you turn off the eye candy I spoke off and may as well change it from 32bit color to 16bit.

[camaro]

Thanks guys, it's running much faster now.