Computer so slow

[Sir Victor]

With 4GB you do not need more main memory you have plenty and unless you are running a 64 bit version of windows, which I seriously doubt, you cannot use more than 4GB.

If you are running out of disk space that is another issue and you can replace the hard drive or remove some infrequently used files.

There is a lot more that you should do, did you run the last program that I mentioned?

Process Explorer is for experts, give it a try if you want and do some reading if you are not familiar with it.

 

[Dream_Operator]

Another good tool for slowing systems is Startup Cop Pro:

Startup Cop Pro

It allows you to control which programs\processes launch at boot, and which run in the background. It isn't free though, but it's well worth the eight bucks it costs.

 

[Sir Victor]

First step to control what runs at startup is to use CCleaner - very easy to use
and free.
Then, use autoruns, free from MS, if you want to alter hidden startups entries
in the registry. Autoruns and Process Explorer are not for the novice.

 

[VWSinger]

A freeware program called "Starter" might be better for non-experts than Autoruns.

It will tell you what applications are set to run on startup, and if you see something that you did not set to run in the background, you can Google it to see if it is really necessary.

Windows Task Manager will tell you how much RAM each application is using, which is also a useful guide to memory hogs.

Having too little free space on your hard disk will also slow your system down.

 

[ayrton]

With 4GB you do not need more main memory you have plenty and unless you are running a 64 bit version of windows, which I seriously doubt, you cannot use more than 4GB.

If you are running out of disk space that is another issue and you can replace the hard drive or remove some infrequently used files.

There is a lot more that you should do, did you run the last program that I mentioned?

Process Explorer is for experts, give it a try if you want and do some reading if you are not familiar with it.

I think I mislead you Victor. I have 4GB of disk space left. I agree that Process Explorer is way over my head. I'll keep trying all the suggesting....things are getting better.

 

[Sir Victor]

Ah! That is not so good, but not a disaster either.
Did you run Malwarebytes and your virus scanner with the full scan option and after updating first? Did they find anything, please tell us the names if they did and you have a log file.

Did you run Spywareblaster?

Do you have an external backup drive?

 

[ayrton]

Yes, I did all those things you mentioned and things seem much better. As far as external drives, I have a bunch of memory sticks. I have two that are 16GB where I keep some simulators I play. I have one racing sim that for some reason I can't play if I put it on a memory stick. That takes up quite a bit of my main memory because it has lots of add ons.

 

[Sir Victor]

Sounds good so far.
I was hoping that you had a large external drive where you could do a full system image backup, but okay.
Next, I would install the free CCleaner, did you do this? Here is the link if not:
http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download/standard

It tells you right at the top of the main menu, the CPU, memory, and chipset that you have, besides being a good cleaner, and startup program.
Can you tell us these things about your system?

 

[njlauren]

If your pc has less then 4 gig of memory, might be worth upgrading it. Rather then using memory sticks, check out an external USB drive, like I said, they are cheap as hell, probably could get a 500 gig one for 30 bucks these days, based on what I see.

If you have only 4 gig of memory open on the hard drive, that could cause the problems you are seeing, big time. a 5 year old XP machine probably has a 200 gig hard drive, and if you have a lot of movies and such it gets eaten up really fast. External drives are cheap and if you ever get a new machine, it can go with it.

Yeah, you can backup and re- install windows but the suggestions people are making are basically the same thing without all that bother. When you do that, it refreshes the registry, and it also ends up defragementing the disk since when it is writing from the backup it writes sequentially, getting rid of the fragmentation. I suspect the hard drive space is one of the big culprits, free up space there, do a defrag, do the registry cleaner, and I would bet you will see pretty good improvement.

 

[ayrton]

Thanks everyone. Machine is running much better. I'm going to look into a large external drive to put my simulators on and go from there. I'm thinking a laptop is in my future and I'll just use this one to play games.

 

[silverwhisper]

i'm glad to know your PC is running better now, but what was it you did, ayrton?

ed

 

[glynndah]

This thread was a lot more interesting when I thought that said "Princess Explorer".

 

[kindashy]

Thanks everyone. Machine is running much better. I'm going to look into a large external drive to put my simulators on and go from there. I'm thinking a laptop is in my future and I'll just use this one to play games.

For external hard drive for home use, get one that comes with its own power supply.

The cheap drives don't have power supply included or don't use it. The manufacturers usually say that they get power from USB port. The problem is that most people use just one USB port for such external drives, and that is usually not enough power, so the external drive breaks within a year or so. The smart thing to do is to use a cable that has two USB connectors that go into the computer and one USB connector that goes into the external hard drive, this way external hard drive gets power from two USB ports. But, that means you loose two USB ports on your computer.


Also, ignore advice about getting more memory for your computer. You have 32-bit Windows Xp, the maximum memory that it will recognize is 4 GB, but it will only use about 3.1-3.4 GB of that, the rest is used for some other stuff and not accessible to your programs. If you still want, get two 2 GB memory modules, bring the computer to its max of 4 GB, but don't expect Windows to use all 4 GB.

 

[njlauren]

For external hard drive for home use, get one that comes with its own power supply.

The cheap drives don't have power supply included or don't use it. The manufacturers usually say that they get power from USB port. The problem is that most people use just one USB port for such external drives, and that is usually not enough power, so the external drive breaks within a year or so. The smart thing to do is to use a cable that has two USB connectors that go into the computer and one USB connector that goes into the external hard drive, this way external hard drive gets power from two USB ports. But, that means you loose two USB ports on your computer.


Also, ignore advice about getting more memory for your computer. You have 32-bit Windows Xp, the maximum memory that it will recognize is 4 GB, but it will only use about 3.1-3.4 GB of that, the rest is used for some other stuff and not accessible to your programs. If you still want, get two 2 GB memory modules, bring the computer to its max of 4 GB, but don't expect Windows to use all 4 GB.

Agreed with the USB drive, get one with its own power, I just saw a 1TB external USB drive for 59 bucks on tiger.com....the self powered ones are more for portable use, like with a laptop, but I would recommend one with its own power supply as well.

 

[eric60red]

This thread was a lot more interesting when I thought that said "Princess Explorer".

wink, wink, I like to exlpore, I hope to bump into you while your floating

 

[ayrton]

Once again, forgive my tech ignorance, but another question. I am having trouble running a racing simulator that is graphic intense. Adding an external drive and putting it on that would not help with making it run smoothly, correct? I am assuming that is a graphics card or whatever it's called problem.

 

[1Browneyedguy]

It amazes me in regard to this new Computer

attack from China on major USA companies that people in these multi-million dollar companies still open emails w/ attachments that they don't know!!

 

[njlauren]

Once again, forgive my tech ignorance, but another question. I am having trouble running a racing simulator that is graphic intense. Adding an external drive and putting it on that would not help with making it run smoothly, correct? I am assuming that is a graphics card or whatever it's called problem.

It is probably a combination of things, games are very, very intensive on resources, gamer PC's in this age where you can buy a pretty high power machine for 800 bucks, are several thousand dollars, they are loaded with memory, have graphics cards with several gigs of memory, and the whole thing is what is called overclocked (run at a higher clock speed, akin to revving an engine about its redline).

A 5 year old machine running XP is going to have problems with a simulator. Graphics cards have their own processor, so the CPU of the machine can handle the actual logic, which the graphic card handles the heavy duty rendering of images. Gamer class graphics cards from Nvidia and ATI have custom done processors and they have a lot of very, very fast memory directly accessed by the processor, and they have as much as 2-4 gigs on them (lot of gamer machines have two cards to handle the load).

Modern gamer pc's also have special expansion slots the main cpu can access the graphics cards in (enhanced pci express I think is the current term), that allows the cpu to send commands to the graphics card and have them get there quickly.

Your old XP with 4 gig of main memory, might have built in graphics or if it has a graphics board, probably only has 256 meg of memory on the video card (not to mention that the card itself is slow). What happens there is that the video card uses part of the main memory of the computer (the 4 gig) to do graphics rendering, the problem is that main memory is not as fast as the stuff on a good graphics card..and that is memory the main CPU cannot use, which may cause programs to swap to disk, which is slow as hell.

If you are really into gaming, especially simulations, I would recommend getting a new machine. My main computer at home is a dell xps8500, with a 1 gig graphics card, an intel I7 processor with 8 gigs of memory, and that while not technically gamer class could do a decent job on most game programs....and it was like 800 bucks on sale (2 tb hard drive, USB 3.0 ports, you name it). I could put more main memory in it (prob couple of hundred bucks to bring it to 16 gig) and a 2 gig graphics card, and it would probably be pretty damn good.

 

[ayrton]

I do have a Nvidia graphics card, but of course it is also over 5 years old. Time for a new machine.

 

[kindashy]

Once again, forgive my tech ignorance, but another question. I am having trouble running a racing simulator that is graphic intense. Adding an external drive and putting it on that would not help with making it run smoothly, correct? I am assuming that is a graphics card or whatever it's called problem.

Yes, moving the game to run from external hard drive will most likely make things worse. The problem in this case is data access. The game pulls date from the hard drive and writes data to the hard drive. If you get an external hard drive that connects using USB, then USB becomes the bottleneck, it is just not as fast as internal buses (Parallel ATA, Serial ATA).

External hard drives are good places for storage, backup, stuff that you need access, but not every other minute. Maybe a movie, some photos, homework, spreadsheets, etc.

Games, when they are active, need to get data much faster, that is why you want to keep it on hard drive that is inside your computer, that has access to faster buses to shuttle the data to cpu and video card.

As far as video card. I would buy something cheap in 50-100 dollar range. I went from stopgap nVidia 8400 to beginner gamer nVidia GTX 460. From the current crop, people say nice things about GTX 650. The next step up is GTX 660. I would probably ignore anything below GTX 650 from the nVidia cards, I am don't keep track of AMD cards so hopefully someone else can help with those. I honestly don't think you need a new computer (I use C2D Q6600, and if my power supply did not break, I would still have my C2D E6600 running too). But a newer video card would make your gaming very much easier/enjoyable. If you decide to upgrade the card, check the power supply, make sure it has more than 400 watt.

 

[ArminasAnarchy]

My computer is running much slower than normal and I think I probably picked up a virus or malware. Can someone suggest the best free anti-virus program. I have tried Malwarebytes, Spybot, Glary Utilities. I use Microsoft Security as my basic Anti Virus. Thanks in advance.

Switch to Linux. Check out Ubuntu or Kubuntu, and run a google search for how to "dual boot", if you want to keep Windows.

Linux is much more secure by design than Windows, and as far as I'm aware there are no Linux viruses "in the wild" currently. And even if there were, it's extremely unlikely you'd get them, coming back to the design again.

 

[ArminasAnarchy]

Switch to Linux. Check out Ubuntu or Kubuntu, and run a google search for how to "dual boot", if you want to keep Windows.

Linux is much more secure by design than Windows, and as far as I'm aware there are no Linux viruses "in the wild" currently. And even if there were, it's extremely unlikely you'd get them, coming back to the design again.

Oh, the memory imprint is also much more reduced. Since it's FOSS, libraries (for programs to run) are shared - so you don't end up with multiple libraries loaded unncessarily.

I've about 200 firefox tabs open at th moment, and I'm only using 2.1GB memory. The processor isn't under a great deal of stress, either. Idle the system use about 400mb, even with all the desktop effects and eyecandy enabled.

 

[ayrton]

Yes, moving the game to run from external hard drive will most likely make things worse. The problem in this case is data access. The game pulls date from the hard drive and writes data to the hard drive. If you get an external hard drive that connects using USB, then USB becomes the bottleneck, it is just not as fast as internal buses (Parallel ATA, Serial ATA).

External hard drives are good places for storage, backup, stuff that you need access, but not every other minute. Maybe a movie, some photos, homework, spreadsheets, etc.

Games, when they are active, need to get data much faster, that is why you want to keep it on hard drive that is inside your computer, that has access to faster buses to shuttle the data to cpu and video card.

As far as video card. I would buy something cheap in 50-100 dollar range. I went from stopgap nVidia 8400 to beginner gamer nVidia GTX 460. From the current crop, people say nice things about GTX 650. The next step up is GTX 660. I would probably ignore anything below GTX 650 from the nVidia cards, I am don't keep track of AMD cards so hopefully someone else can help with those. I honestly don't think you need a new computer (I use C2D Q6600, and if my power supply did not break, I would still have my C2D E6600 running too). But a newer video card would make your gaming very much easier/enjoyable. If you decide to upgrade the card, check the power supply, make sure it has more than 400 watt.

If I opt for a new graphics card is there any compatibility issues I should be concerned about? Will the newer cards work with an older computer and Windows XP?

 

[Sir Victor]

I don't think I've seen you tell us your current processor, amount of RAM, and the chipset and video card in your system. The graphics card compatibility depends one what type of expansion slot is available in the system. It is possible that all you need is more RAM and disk space.

 

[kindashy]

If I opt for a new graphics card is there any compatibility issues I should be concerned about? Will the newer cards work with an older computer and Windows XP?

The main issue will be your computer power supply. Most brand name computers have crappy power supplies, something in 250-350 watt range. That is enough to run the computer and basic video card. For better cards you will want power supply that can do 450-550 watt, once you pick the card, then we can look up more specific numbers.

A secondary issue, that I don't think you have, is to make sure that you have PCI-e slot for the video card. Here is good illustration. You want a slot like the long yellow one (labeled PCIe x16), that is full size PCI-e 16 lane slot. I bet you have at least one.


http://cdn.avsforum.com/d/d5/d50b9d8b_800px-pci_und_pcie_slots.jpeg



You might have a video card already in that slot. You can use GPU-z to check your video card. GPU-z is very nice little utility: http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/2198/TechPowerUp_GPU-Z_v0.6.7.html

Here are GPU-z screen shots of my cards:

http://gpuz.techpowerup.com/13/02/24/xx.png
http://gpuz.techpowerup.com/13/02/24/45h.png



I have not had any issues with drivers yet. I run 32-bit Xp. They are still supporting Xp. I run 306.23 driver for my nVidia cards. It was released September 2012. I have automatic thingy running that notifies me when new driver is out, there is newer driver, but I have not had the need to update. 314.07 was released on Feb 18, 2013.