Hello. Hopefully someone can give me a clue...I have a Dell Dimension 4550 2.5GHz, 1Mb RAM, 60Gb hard drive running XP SP2 and (amongst other things) McAfee (scan, firewall, spam...) and AOL for Internet access. Over the past month my pc has started running progresively slower and slower, boot up time is now >5mins, another 4/5 mins for AOL to connect, and my fad for running iTunes in the background for music now interrupts what I'm doing in the foreground, i.e. for example mouse movement is jerky, and keyboard actions are delayed.
I've tried all of the obvious maintenance actions...clean up, defrag, clearing temp folders, caches, cookies....to no effect.
When things are slooooooow the PC is clearly active as the hard drive is chuntering away and it's little green led is flashing. But what's it doing?
Any words of wisdom anyone please?

Curlyben

I would recomend just running Anti Virus on your machine and investing in an Internet Gateway Router box.

DPL

Turned off all the AOL files in MSCONFIG and as far as I can tell, no difference. AOL still runs but pc still slow.

I'll be looking further at the Hijack thing over the weekend but on a quick look there's nothing bad to remove and most other things have a component of the file name that sounds like legit stuff.

Perhaps it is just the McAfee stuff...

Curlyben

You say you have turned off the AOL stuff, have you tried turning EVERYTHING off ?

Also it maybe worth running your spyware scans in safe mode as this can be alot quicker.

DPL

Curylben

At the start of this discussion it was taking 11 minutes or so from hitting the start button to getting internet access...We had a 'clear out' from MSCONFIG start up which got us down to around 5mins 30 secs. Good progress.

I've now tried the following in stages, all together, in different combinations, and back to the above baseline and several times to gather data. I even tried switching on the pc with a bag over my head in case there's personal element to this. Here's the bottom line...

* Unchecking EVERYTHING in MSCONFIG improves the time to around 5min 10secs but partially disables McAfee.
* Disabling virus scan...no change
* Disabling anti-hacker...no change
* Disabling spamkiller....no change
* Disabling firewall...no change
* With the bag over my head...incremental 5 hours as I tripped and knocked myself out

So, in MSCONFIG I've checked the McAfee files again and abled the McAfee protection and I'm back at 5min 30 secs.

Still 3min 30secs over what you thought was a good target?

Curlyben

Sorry to hear about that.
If you want your speed back to somewhere it should be a complete rebuild is in order !

Time to back up all you important data, find all your install CD's and go for it

Good luck

DPL

I joined the forum yesterday...

Here's what I know...

* Several people jumped in to join me within a couple of minutes of posting.
* My start up time has reduced from over 11 minutes to around 5 minutes. Seems a pretty good improvement to me.
* I know a lot more about what makes pc's run slow and what doesn't.
* I know how to do more advanced maintenance and what to monitor.
* I know where to ask for advice.

Here's what I don't know

* Where the hell is Ankh-Morpork?

Curlyben

Here's Ankh-Morpork for those that don't know

There's more about it Here

DPL

Er, right. So it's not that you mis-spelt the name of that little village just outside Berwick-upon-Tweed then.

In simple terms, coz I'm a simple bloke, what would re-installing achieve? I guess I mean what might be put in that should be there but might no longer there, what might be taken out that shouldn't be there and , if so, how did it get there in the first place...and so on.

I can take engines out of cars, rebuild them and put them back in and they work. DIY? No sweat. Squash and 5-a-side? With only one arm and one leg if necessary (though I'm pushing the age thing now). Solve my daughter's boy friend troubles? Easy. Backing up and uninstalling the OS? Serious stuff. Nightmare stuff. End-of-the-world stuff.