Hi, Love this forum and this is my first post. I have a fairly old computer which has had a few bits and pieces changed over the years. It seems to be really noisy, labouring and slow just now and I wondered if anyone could advise on what I could do? It has an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ processor, 1gb Ram, 2 hard drives (original 28gb and the second 120gb and a NVIDIA Geforce 7600 graphics card. It is running Windows XP and I use it mainly for Internet, Itunes and downloading. I've tried cleaning out the files, defrag etc. but it is still so slow and it is driving me nuts. There also seems to be something 'missing' from it as it never remembers searches etc. Considering the age of it (must be 5 years plus old I think). Should I call it quits and not do any more work on it and just invest in something new ? Any advise would be great as I'm not really clued up on the technical stuff. Thanks.
the athlon 64 3000 is fast enough for what you do, it will even make a decent game machine. If your computer is slowing down you can check the following 1. any antispyware software will slow your computer (spyware terminator and spysweeper are examples). I would remove them and rely on my antivirus also use the free "returnil" when you surf the internet (it wont slow you down) 2. make sure your hard drives are set to DMA instead of PIO. if they are set incorrectly it will be very slow. 3. Also since you have 2 hard drives, make sure the jumpers are set correctly (example don't have 2 drives set as master on the same cable). 4. Do a scandisk with the box to fix errors on all your harddrives, file corruption will slowdown the entire computer. 5. If you have a lot of video files, you might want to disable the video thumbnail shell. XP sometimes will slowdown with video files. 6. When the computer is at idle no programs running (except antivirus/firewall) do a control/alt/delete and check what the cpu usage is reading. It should be less than 5 percent. If it's reading 90 percent with no programs running, you have some sort of hardware problem. I would check the onboard video card (install a PCI audio card to test). On you 28gb hard drive. is that 5400 or 7200 rpm, you might want to check the speed. If it's 5400, it's probably not fast enough to use as a boot drive.)
Thanks for the reply Jony218. Like I said I'm a bit clueless about computers but I've tried out a few things you suggested but could I ask you, how do I find out the speed of the hard drive? How do I set it to DMA? Should I consider swapping the hard drives around? I'm tempted to wipe everything and start again.... I've checked the CPU and when the computer is idle it is jumping all over the place from 5% to 85%. The computer always sounds as if it is 'working' even when I'm not actually doing anything on it. As for trying run anything in the background...forget it! Thanks for any help.
you can check your hard drive settings under control panel/system/hardware/device manager/ide ata atapi controllers. You have a primary and secondary check each and it will show you if it's dma or pio. On your cpu usage, it shouldn't be jumping from 5 to 85 percent. Right now on my computer, I'm surfing the internet and watching tv (tv tuner card) and my cpu is at 3 to 5 percent. There is something on your computer that is using your cpu, if you have no other programs running (except your firewall and antivirus and background windows processes, you should be at 2-3 percent cpu usage). When I had a similar problem with my cpu running at 90 percent all the time, I had to install a pci soundcard to fix it (the onboard soundcard was using the cpu constantly). If you have a soundcard lying around, you might want to try that fix. But if you are using antispyware software that is always running in the background even if you disable it. The only way to clear it as a culprit is to uninstall it.
Found a spyware and now that I've uninstalled it, things seem to be running a bit smoother. Thanks for the help.
