Slow Slow Slow PC

Hi,

Just been looking at a friends machine

It's a AMD Duron 1300mhz 512 megs ram, 40 gb internal ide harddrive and external Maxtor 500 gb harddrive - Windows XP FULLY updated

He told me it was running VERY slow, and I thought I could fix it, he had a LOT of stuff running in the background, which I killed off and now it only runs the essential windows progs and AVG

I have been through the cleaning process (malware removal etc)

He fragments it every few months

I know this is an old machine, but I have an old 1000mhz machine that runs about ten times faster.

He has a USB hub (belkin), that I think is USB 1.1 (7 port hub) That he has 7 devices plugged into ALL the time including is external harddrive, his modem, wireless router etc

Is it possible he could be overloading it, sometimes it takes ages to load and displays a black screen for about 5 minutes before windows loads.

It seems to be trying to communicate with the external harddrive could it be slow because it's going through USB 1 and not 2.0?

I disconnected the drive and it was still as slow.

I am prob going to reformat and start again but do you have any suggestions ideas, something is really slowing it down - Thanks

Oh and it's not just the starting up, when the desktop icons try and load it takes a while for it to show the thumbnail he told me they used to come up straight away..

..and it takes forever to run programs etc


:major

 

Did you use CCleaner during the spyware/adware removal process? I used that on a friends a removed 5Gb of crud with instant speed returns. It does seem like he has a lot of external devices running and this will impede speed.

 

CCleaner,

Yes I did and it removed 1.3 GB of stuff, he is using the new AVG 8.0 and I have to say I'm disappointed with it, it takes up sooo much more memory.

AVG was always good as it was lightweight and took up few resources.

I tried uninstalling and it was a little bit quicker but still took a LONG time to boot.

My dad has a 1000mhz machine with 512 ram with a lot more running aswell as AVG 8.0 and it's still a lot faster???

 

Yea I find I had to disable the Link Scanner in AVG to speed up my surfing otherwise it was getting significantly bogged down and slowing down internet majorily, but apart from that it runs fine.

You could use "Process Explorer" to find out exactly what is running:

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=4566

Right click on any unsure entry and it will "google" it for you.