"My Computer " & "Control Panel" Very Slow to Open

[dave138]

NT 4.0 WS, SP6a, IE 6.0, etc., has suddenly become *very* slow (2-5 min.), but only when opening My Computer (including almost any function which tries to access directory trees) or Control Panel. Any application works just fine, including Save As..., and at normal speed. Eventually, directory/file access works Ok, but extremely slowly.

The only other odd thing is when booting, it hangs for ~5 minutes and finally opens to the empty directory L: Program (not the boot drive which is C, which then can be closed.

Any thoughts/tips will be much appreciated.

 

[johncurtis]

Are you running out of space on any of the drives?

How is the page file set?

John

 

[wolluf]

Something loading when windows boots? Use Startup Manager to see

http://www.lpacomputers.telinco.co.uk/SM.zip.

'The only other odd thing is when booting, it hangs for ~5 minutes and finally opens to the empty directory L: Program (not the boot drive which is C, which then can be closed.'

What do you mean by this. NT normally just boots to the desktop. Is this a command prompt box that's opening?

 

[dave138]

Boot drive has approx. 175 MB free out of 2,046 (FAT, as are drives D& E - original HDD). Other logical drives on 2nd HDD are ~20MB, ~50% free and NTFS. Page files are 10MB on C: and 250MB on Mwhich is empty except for this portion of page file. I've tried to free up space on boot drive, but it must have a lot of junk from various MS apps (like MS Office) that insist on loading up boot drive, regardless of where they are installed. Would I be better off increasing page file on boot drive if possible?

Dave

 

[dave138]

When booting, it boots as it should to desktop, but hangs for about 5 minutes until it completely opens a separate window with the empty directory L: Program. Then, any attempt at accessing a file in My Computer takes ages. It also takes about 5 min. for the icons in Control panel to show up. All apps work like lightning. The processes tab in Task Manager doesn't seem to show any new/unusual processes from the earlier normal operation.

Dave

 

[wolluf]

I'd remove paging file entirely from C:.

Also, does it need to be FAT? If you converted it to NTFS, you'd regain several hundred megabytes of space.

 

[wolluf]

Something must be trying to run for the L: box prompt to start up. Need to find that and stop it first. Have you had a look at Startup Manager?

 

[dave138]

I thought I'd read (several years ago, admittedly) that NT needed about 10MB in FAT on bootdrive. If not, I'd love to convert and consolidate several 2.046 MB FAT drives to bigger NTFS partitions

 

[thatrenowned]

Try downloading a defrag program, e.g. Diskeeper Lite. You should be able to find it somewhere for free (look on

http://www.google.com).

Try clearing out old User Profiles (Right Click My Computer -> Properties -> User Profiles).

Clear out temp and temporary internet files.

Run a registry cleaner, e.g. RegVac

To get Control Panel to open quicker, go to your WINNT folder and delete Control.ini . Reboot and launch control panel. This will rebuild the file which can sometimes become corrupt.


Have you made any changes to your system recently?

 

[wolluf]

Dave - NT doesn't need any FAT on the boot drive. You'd need something like Partition Magic to consolidate the partitions - but just converting will release a lot of space (I always use NTFS now, but a few years ago converted a 2GB FAT partition with c. 1.2GB used. After conversion, only just over 900MB used).

 

[dave138]

Thanks for the tips - I shall try converting & also getting Control Panel to rebuild itself. I frequently use HD Valet &/or EasyCleaner & Diskeeper Lite to ditch junk files & old reg entries. No other system changes that I know of (barring something kids haven't told me about!).

Dave

 

[reidsolberg]

Make sure you look through the existing user accounts for unneccesary large files. I imagine that a profile with a few hundred MB hidden in its directories could cause some of these symptoms.