system is getting dog slow

[pentium]

My father wanted to ask you guys because he is almost had enough of this.

Back in 200/2001 he bought a Cicero desktop with 128 mb ram a 600 mhz PIII, cd-rw and the likes. In the last year and a half since he wiped the maxtor 13 gig drive and installed xp with NTFS the system has been getting dog slow. Making it worse he uses norton for almost everything and that's not doing any good.
I then went and began to upgrade. The cpu was upgraded to 866, the ram maxed at 256, a 16 meg video card was installed, the cd drive was replaced with a dvd drive, the cd rw drive was cleaned and not replaced and the PSU had a bad cap so i swapped it out for something better.
I went with a stopwatch and braced for an improvement and I was suprised.
From when I pressed the power button to when the system was done logging me in and the drive done loading everything it took a staggering HALF AN HOUR!
I didn't leave the pc the whole time and login was done as soon as I was able to login. Defrags are done weekly but they usually take the whole night.

Time for a new drive?

[dood]

Re: system is getting dog slow

I'm surprised that a board of that era only supports a max of 256mb while running an 866mhz processor...

I would guess that a new hard drive will greatly speed things up. Is the current drive only ATA-33? Does the board support ATA-66 for the primary IDE chain? If so, make sure you get an 80 conductor cable, and get a reasonable HD (40gb, ATA-100, $37.99 on Newegg)

[pentium]

Re: system is getting dog slow

I'm not positive if it's ATA-33 or ATA-66 but I know it uses the 80-conductor cable and the cache in the hard drive is a mere 512k.
No need to buy a new drive. I have a few drives floating around the house.

[Maxxarcade]

Re: system is getting dog slow

Norton slows things down worse than anything I've seen. My dad used to use it on his Celeron 900 Laptop. I had him switch to AntiVir and he said it is like a new computer.

Also, you should be able to use more RAM than that. Are you saying it's maxed out because you ran out of slots? WinXP really takes off if you can get 512MB at a minimum.

And yes, a faster hard drive will help, especially going from 5400 RPM to 7200RPM.

[pentium]

Re: system is getting dog slow

We already tried to upgrade to 512 and the board failed the known good ram.
Any combination of ram over 256 megs and POST gives memory errors and adjusts it's size to 256 megs.

On the hard drive:
My father is the kind of guy who has many settings and everything is perfectly set to what he likes. Re's refusing to use a new drive and start fresh by reinstalling all his software and setting everything again. He insists I backup the drive as an image and once the new drive is installed I just dump the image on the new drive.
That's like getting a new engine and just dumping the used oil from your old engine in.
Yes, you do have your files and settings but what about the things you didn't want like adware and memory leaks?

[Spacedye69]

Re: system is getting dog slow

On the ram, make sure you use double sides 256meg sticks. We use XP Pro on some old PII450 machines with 256 meg and they run fine. We use McAfee, which is almost as slow as Norton, but it is the network version.

[WNG]

Re: system is getting dog slow

My girlfriend bought a Cicero system from FutureShop 2-3 yrs ago. A 2.2 GHz P4 on a MSI mATX SiS chipset motherboard.
I can't say I'm impressed with the quality, but at least it came with a recognized motherboard brand.

You'll need to provide more info regarding the guts of the system. What motherboard?

Any BIOS upgrades for this model? may require it to go to XP and some weird HW combo.
Obvious stuff is make sure the BIOS cache settings are correct...L1 and L2 enabled.
HDD/IDE settings for max transfer.

Have the HDD checked for failure. If it has SMART, read the data.
If not, put it into another system as a slave and see if it can be accessed normally.
Transfer some big files and see if it chokes.

I also can't believe it maxes at only 256 MB. But then again, Intel made plenty of product that had memory handling caps. I have a Tualatin motherboard that can't take more than 512 MB.

Dump Norton, use Avira, AVG, SpywareBlaster, Adaware.

Ah, sign of old age...can't be flexible. You can lead a horse to water but can't force it to drink.

Why don't you make him a dual-boot hdd? Copy his original disk image, and set aside another partition for a fresh XP Pro install.
Since they are both XP, the bootloader will have no problem. He can run his old slow system, or run the fresh one, and slowly rebuild his settings...try alternative SW. Once done and happy, migrate the new partition.

With your HW, 866 MHz and 256 MB SDRAM, it should be able to run XP decently quick.
I have a Dell laptop with a 650 MHz P3 and 256 MB for the kids and it runs great.

Open task manager and make sure you have enough RAM left. Maybe he's running to much memory hogging junk and the system is on the pagefile/swap-drive.

Make sure to use Windows Classic theme (vectored graphics) and not one of the pretty ones (bitmap heavy). And select the OS options for max performance.
Don't load up on tons of WAVs for each possible sound option. Don't use a screensaver. And look up which Windows services to shut down and not have loaded in the background.

[Per Hansson]

Re: system is getting dog slow

Download Spybot from www.safer-networking.de

Download the free version of Lavasoft from www.lavasoft.de

Update them and clean everything you find away, uninstall Norton (also search for their uninstall program on the web and run that afterwards)

Now you can install a decent antivirus software like Symantec Corporate or if you are feeling cheaper any of the free antivirus programs.

[pentium]

Re: system is getting dog slow

My father would hang me off the deck if I uninstalled norton.
Every time a new version of system works comes out he pays to have a copy delivered to his door.

[gdement]

Re: system is getting dog slow

We already tried to upgrade to 512 and the board failed the known good ram.
Any combination of ram over 256 megs and POST gives memory errors and adjusts it's size to 256 megs.

On the hard drive:
My father is the kind of guy who has many settings and everything is perfectly set to what he likes. Re's refusing to use a new drive and start fresh by reinstalling all his software and setting everything again. He insists I backup the drive as an image and once the new drive is installed I just dump the image on the new drive.
That's like getting a new engine and just dumping the used oil from your old engine in.
Yes, you do have your files and settings but what about the things you didn't want like adware and memory leaks?

I think this is probably the main problem. I'd check the task manager, as someone else suggested.
Then I'd try to build a fresh install for him and carefully import all his old data. Don't wipe out the original drive, so you can always find anything you missed or give him his old drive back if he insists. If you don't mess with his original drive then he won't have any reason to complain about your experiment. When it runs 10x faster he'll see you were right.

ATA-33 isn't the latest and greatest, and 256MB isn't as much as most people want nowadays, but it shouldn't be *that* slow. Something is really wrong if it takes 30 minutes to boot.

The chipset is the main thing that determines your RAM compatibility. 440BX and i810 definitely need the right type of memory for 256MB modules to work, and I think i815 has that issue as well. VIA is more flexible but it doesn't like running more than 2 modules at PC133.

256MB modules that use 16 of the 16Mx8 type memory chips are compatible with almost anything that's supposed to support them. Some generic modules might be double sided but use the 32Mx4 chips, which won't work. Reputable brands though won't do that, so if it's double sided name brand then it's about the best you can do.

The i810 and i815 are limited to 4 banks of memory. So if you're using double sided 128MB modules, then 2 of those would use up all the banks.

I've sometimes had boards where I tried memtest86 and discovered the memory access was running incredibly slow, even though it was stable. Might be worth a check. On one machine I found that this would happen if I installed more than 384MB memory. And this was on a K6-3 which isn't affected by the cacheable range issue, so I'm not sure what was going on there. Maybe something about the RAM you're using just isn't working right in the board.

Your dad sounds like somebody who needs a robust machine to keep up with all the software he likes to run. My brother in law is like that. When I was building a machine for him I gave him more memory than I'd normally have given him, because I knew he'd have it running lots of stuff. If you can't get it running with more RAM, then he sounds like he may need another board.

[pentium]

Re: system is getting dog slow

Your dad sounds like somebody who needs a robust machine to keep up with all the software he likes to run.

He works for the BC government. Water, land and air protection department.
Re uses this computer sometimes to remotely connect to his office computer which is remotely connected to the remote server in Victoria (right now they are security freaks so there is currently no on-site storage permitted and all service calls go to IBM and they gouge like hell so my father says).
Remote connections like that are really hard to configure and he also does billing, internet work and our addressbook is loaded on this system.

Would it be okay if I slave this drive to make it the second hard drive and then master the new hard drive and after a clean install of XP he can start pulling files to the new drive?

[bgavin]

Re: system is getting dog slow

Teach your dad to use Sandboxie for safe surfing, or get him setup with a VMWare workstation on his main machine. He can tinker all he wants on the VMWare machine (and surf), while keeping his main machine clean.

I run a VM for all the stuff that I install and eventually want to remove, i.e. Turbo Tax. I have one Novell server left, so I installed the Novell Client on the VM instead of the host machine.

[willawake]

Re: system is getting dog slow

i second the part about double sided ram. still if the hdd is taking so long to boot up then probably its gonna die soon.

still win2k is gonna be faster than xp anyway on a minimal system. i would recommend however 512 for win2k. i would not recommend to move to xp.

the hdd can be speeded up greatly by moving to a 7200 if it is less.

another method is installing an ata 133 card. i have seen great performance increases by doing this.

In the end though moving up to a more current solution would be best. even some of the cheapies i installed last year with 2.66 celeron, wowee such an improvement from an 866.

[pentium]

Re: system is getting dog slow

In the end though moving up to a more current solution would be best. even some of the cheapies i installed last year with 2.66 celeron, wowee such an improvement from an 866.

I still don't think it's worth it.
Before my BE6 got bad caps it was running a lower spec setup than my fathers and even with system works 2003 it was far faster. It only had 128 megs ram, an 8 meg video card, a 4 gig hard drive that was not even ATA and it ran xp smoothly.
I have spare time today, I better start looking through the stack of hard drives I own.

[gdement]

Re: system is getting dog slow

Would it be okay if I slave this drive to make it the second hard drive and then master the new hard drive and after a clean install of XP he can start pulling files to the new drive?

That ought to be fine. Just to be sure nothing happens on accident, I'd set up the OS without the old drive connected yet.

You could also copy the old drive to a network share on your LAN, and just restore files via the network. Either way, I'd leave the old drive alone in case you/he wants to go back to it. Might also want to run a diagnostic on that drive.

[pentium]

Re: system is getting dog slow

You got a point there.
If I can hold this off until I get hard drive and cpu for my proliant I could just move the files we want to keep to the server and not need a second drive in the system for a short while.

[davmax]

Re: system is getting dog slow

Well if your father insists on Norton it seems that it is time to upgrade to a faster and better system!!!!!!

[Topcat]

Re: system is getting dog slow

Well if your father insists on Norton it seems that it is time to upgrade to a faster and better system!!!!!!

2nd.

[redeye53]

Re: system is getting dog slow

Another thing you could check is in the device manager under IDE/ATAPI controllers /Primary/Advanced make sure the drive isn't set to PIO only. If it is reset to DMA if available.
Now under Computer in the device manager if it says Standard PC this will slow the computer drastically. It should say ACPI compliant. Unfortunatly to change the HAL(Hardware Abstraction Layer) means the right settings in the bios and a reinstall of windows.

[UraBahn]

Re: system is getting dog slow

I heard you're using a Maxtor HD there. My brother had a 80GB Maxtor that started running glacially slow before it finally went belly-up, so yeah, you might want to replace it.