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1.8 Ghz Pentium 4 EXTREMELY slow
I support 10 Dell computers for a small office. What should be the fastest of them, a 1.8 Ghz Pentium 4 Dimension 4500S, is much slower than Pentium III computers running at less than half the speed. We are not running particularly power-hungry applications, either: Outlook 2000, WordPerfect Office 2002, Internet Explorer 6.0.
The OS has been upgraded from Windows XP Home Edition to Windows XP Professional.
We run a Windows 2000 network, but the problem doesn't seem to be related to the network.
We do not know whether the computer has ever functioned properly because the person who had the computer for the first month no longer works here. It has been slow since that time.
I suppose I should define slow. Applications take several minutes to launch, and sometimes 30 seconds to close.
I have turned off all startup items.
I am about to reformat and reinstall Windows, to make sure the problem isn't OS-related.
Suggestions?
I would format the hard drive and reinstall the operating system. I noticed you can add 2 Dos commands in the config.sys file. It does speed up the hard drive in accessing files. I added files=200, buffers=300. I noticed a great tweak improvement. I spend several hours tweaking Windows xp ... My Dell 8200 P4 2.0 flies .
Good luck!
tampaboi,
How do you get into the config.sys?? I tried going to the windows command prompt and typed in config.sys and it asked me to open it with a program. I tried notepad (which is what usually works with system files) and wordpad. I also installed tweakUI to see if that would help, but it didn't.
I cannot find it on the hard drive with view all files on, and search won't pull it up with search hidden files and folders enabled.
Thanks.
Not really sure if this is related but it does remind me of a similar experience a few months ago. Can't recall what I was doing to the computer exactly before it happened but it started to boot and run programs really slow. It took several minutes to boot and programs took forever to load. Even then there was not much I could really do in most programs. Easy CD Creator would not run also. I tried System Restore to various restote points but to no avail. Also went into msconfig to minmiize the system tray components but still no joy. After leaving the computer unused for a while, I still couldn't figure out what was happening. I decided to do some housecleaning (literally) to clear out the dustbunnies around and inside the computer. While doing so I noticed that the Click drive was not seated snugly in the drive housing. After I cleaned out the computer and hooked up all the connectors and cables the computer booted up normally. Could there be some hardware connections that are loose in your balky computer? If those check out, I'd go ahead and do a clean install of the OS.
Dell Dimension 8200 P4 2 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 80 GB HDD, DVD-ROM, CD-R/W, NVidia 64MB Ti 200, Santa Cruz sound card, 250 MB Zip internal, 40 MB Click, 100 GB Buslink USB 2.0 external HDD, Sony DRX-500UL DVD+R/RW, OrangeMicro Dual USB 2.0/Firewire PCI card, Windows XP Home Edition, SP1
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Posted February 10th, 2003 18:00