VERY slow for my desktop come up..

Hi everyone! Got a new Dell. Help PLEASE!!! I got Verizon DSL. And when I click on my account, to get my desktop to come up on the screen, completly loaded, it would take approx 5 to 6 minutes to load. It takes forever. Why???
Memory???
Verizon???
My phone lines???
I could get more RAM, but wanna wait before I spend $100.00
Please help me out here, and thank you....
ByteGeek

 

Make sure you dont have a lot of things running at startup.

 

I don't. I am just booting up

 

Yeah, make sure there aren't any programs taht run at startup.

 

Neo, how do you suggest he goes about doing this?

 

I was going to say click start-Run-msconfig but I wasn't sure what OS this person had.

 

yeah but i wasn't sure what OS msconfig was on so I dnit' want to give out false information.

 

MSConfig is on 98/ME/XP

the MSCONFIG.exe CAN be used on Win2k as well but by default win2k doesn't have it.

 

Sorry I'm late, I have XP-Home ed. And by the way, I have already got into msconfig, and deselect some. Only the clock, hp, and Mcafee comes up at startup. Also, after my desktop does get loaded (after 7 minutes) I go to right click on any of my icons to open up, it still takes about 5 seconds before that box opens up??????

Same for my Outlook, takes forever to open up

Do any of you guys suspect it might be my a RAM? I have 128 mb of RAM.

 

128 really isn't enough. 256 is the bare min. I would venture a guess and say that RAM is probably one of the primary causes of your slow boot / load time.

 

512 would be ideal.

 

I would also recommend you download a registry cleaner such as RegCleaner (http://www.majorgeeks.com/download460.html). When you uninstall a program there are things left over called registry entries and those can slow down your start up. Just be sure that you know what you are deleting when you are using this program and only delete the things that you know you have deleted from your computer and are things that can be deleted. Make sure the manufacture is something you recognize because if you delete the wrong registry entries your computer can screw up big time. THis handy program will backup all things you delete though so don't worry too much. It also has the option to select which programs start up similar to msconfig.

 

RAM should help, but how old is the PC? Basically what speed is your processor? My old 400MHz machine takes 3-4 minutes to boot up and I only have 6-7 programs loading into it, the newer programs (last 2-3 years) seem to want more reasources.

Also with my older machine there are certain programs that when running just about take all other functions from it, when certain programs are running on that one a right click may take 20-30 seconds to open the menu.

 

Thanks EVERYONE! I am convinced that it may be my memory(RAM). I am gonna get some more RAM, probably a 512. Stay tuned for about a month and I will let you guys know what happens. Thanks again for your feedbaks.....



BYTEGEEK!!!!