Slow Dell Laptop

[depawl]

This is a Dell Inspiron running XP Home w/SP2, 512 M RAM. It generally runs slow, but most troublesome is the slow boot time. It especially hangs for several minutes at the XP splash screen, then several more at the welcome screen. Programs such as Firefox or control Panel take 10 to 15 seconds to open.I have ran all the usual (and not so usual) malwre routines (SpyBot, AdAware, Ccleaner, Combofix, AVG AntiSpyware, etc.). Nothing of interest there. I have ran chkdsk and defrag, turned off all startup items in msconfig, and turned off all non-microsoft services, to no avail. I have searched through this and other forums, also with no luck. Any suggestions would be most appreciated.
Thanks.

 

[SirBlack]

Hi depawl,

It may be a problem with your RAM since you've seemed to have eliminated many items that slow down a system. You can try testing your RAM by following the directions @ this site:

http://www.laptoprepair101.com/laptop/2006/01/20/laptop-desktop-memory-test/

Hope this helps!

Bob

 

[pansophic]

Have you added any new hardware, especially like a USB printer, to your system recently?

Also, if there are any File Explorer plug-ins installed, they will frequently cause these kinds of delays.

You might want to try booting into Safe Mode, which loads a limited driver set, to see if there are problems when booting without most of your advanced device support.


pansophic

 

[G0AOZ]

What's CPU usage (in Task Manager) showing? Have you checked for any unusual services running under the Processes tab? Try running HijackThis to identify unwanteds...

ROGER - G0AOZ.

 

[xwb]

Is it one of those speed step ones that thinks it is running on battery permanently and has switched to the lower speed?

 

[depawl]

Thanks to all who have replied so far.
1) memtest did not reveal any errors.
2) I had previously tried disabling all browser plugins, which seemed to have no effect, and no new devices have been added recently. Stll seems slow in Safe Mode, although boot up time is reduced somewhat.
3) cpu usage after boot is very low (normally 0). I didn't see unusual processes in Task Manager.
4) The icon in the taskbar indicates that it recognizes that is running on ac power.
I guess at this point my only 2 options are are to increase RAM or reformat and reinstall.

 

[G0AOZ]

If you have the facilities and a spare (newish) hard drive, it might be worth seeing if you can image or copy over this drive. I have recently had three laptops, one of them a Dell Inspiron 8100 which was deathly slow. Ran several different diags on the drive (IBM Travelstar), but nothing untoward revealed, no errors reported. Copied everything over onto a brand new Hitachi HDD, and from then on it whizzed along and booted up nice and quickly.

ROGER - G0AOZ.

 

[depawl]

Thanks G0AOZ.
That's something I had not thought of. I don't have the ability to try a new hard drive at this point, but I'll keep it in mind if additional memory or a reformat don't correct the problem

 

[bchizary]

have a check how big your paging file is (control panel, system, advanced, perfomance, settings, advanced, virtual memory, change) i had a dell c400 running very slow, changed that to system managed size, click set, and then reboot, and it seemed to run a lot quicker.

 

[Texkonc]

Laptop HD are known for being slow, you might have a 4200rpm drive.

Check the page file size. It is best to have it at 1.5-3x the amount of ram.

 

[Texkonc]

We have a lot of the Dell SX 260'-280's here at our office and they are dog slow, but they do a lot in terminal server. Those SFF all have Laptop Harddrives.

 

[depawl]

Checked the paging file size. Tried both "System Managed" and set it to 1.5X the RAM, seemed to make no difference. Increased RAM from 512 up to 1024, also made no difference. The most annoying problem I'm having is that after the (slow) startup, any programs or applications (Firefox, Control Panel, My Computer, Word) take a long time to open (maybe 10 seconds or so) during which time there is a lot of HD activity. Once a program has been opened, it reopens fine (and fast) until the computer is restarted again, after which the initial opening is again slow. It's got me stumped.

 

[Texkonc]

Did you make it 768 at min and 3095(not sure about the exact number for 3gb) at max?


What is your HardDrive space like?

 

[depawl]

The hard drive on this unit is near capacity (college kids seem to collect a lot of stuff). I'm going to have the user offload a bunch of pictures and videos and songs, suspect that will help a lot. Also, this unit had 2 256 M RAM sticks, I removed one and added a 1 G stick, which seemed to make little if any difference, but then I removed the other 256 stick, and used just the new 1 G stick, and that seemed to improve performance noticably. Hopefully clearing up the hard drive will improve things more to where it's usable again.
thanks to all who posted.

 

[Texkonc]

Since you have run all the good tools, use that 1 gig stick and then play with the page file settings, and clean up the drive and you should be good to go.

It is still going to be slow, since it is a laptop and a Dell

I have a 2ghz cpu in my Dell 600m and 2gigs of ram and a new 160gb HD and it is very snappy with performance! I can even run some Games

 

[linney]

The PC Decrapifier (originally titled, Introducing the Dell De-Crapifier…)

http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/