xp pro has slowed down over time

[weakins]

had pro installed for 6 months or so & i'm getting slow windows performance. the hard drive (160 scsi) takes longer to boot. reads slower & has alot of pauses when booted. i've benchmarked the drive from the begginning & again now. not a drive issue. i've tested all the hardware components w/ sandra, no failures. this leads me to windows or other s/w. i've completely removed NAV, no diff. run full norton system works, disk clean, defrag, spybot, no diff. no changes to startup group so this isn't the issue. this feels like win98 how it would slow down over time. anyone experience this? any ideas? i'm about ready to do a clean install.
thanks,
bill eakins

 

[bcastner]

Do not dismiss out of hand the possiblity of malware. Usually this is not a virus, and your antivirus progam is doing its job, but malware none the less.

Faq faq608-4650 has some good notions to do first, Steps #1 - #3, and linney offers a fairly comprehensive list of other approaches: thread779-729755

 

[weakins]

that helped thanks alot!

 

[linney]

310419 - Computer Speed and Performance May Decrease

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;310419&FR=1&PA=1&SD=HSCH

HOW TO: Set Performance Options (Q308417)

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q308/4/17.asp

 

[dholbrook]

weakins,

First off, you MUST run a good antivirus program, and KEEP IT CURRENT. Sweep your system to make sure you do not have a virus on the system. If you do, remove it, run the virus sweep again to be sure, and repeat as needed until the system comes up clean. If you have one virus, you may well have several. If so, you may be facing the wipe and re-install as the only real way to clean out the system.

Next, houseclean. If you have been using this system for several months on the Internet, you need to clean out the temp internet files for ALL the user accounts on the system. You can begin in IE, open it up, select tools, internet options. Here you should first select the number of days to retain the pages in history to a small number, like one! Next, under the temp. internet files, first delete the cookies, then the files.

WHile this will remove a lot of them from the system it does not remove all the old cookies, etc, that will have to be done manually. To do this, in WIN2k (don't know if this is identical in XP, but I think it is), you use the windows explorer (Start, right click, select explore). In explorer, you must have the view set to show the hidden files and folders. To make sure this is set, go under tools, folder options, view. Make sure Show hidden files is selected.

Now, log on as an administrator. In explorer, go to the documents and settings directory. Here you will find all the user accounts on the system. Under each user, under local settings (this is the normally hidden directory), there is a temporary internet directory that will have a subdirectory called content.ie5, or something similar. This is where all the cookies live! (By the way, now is also a good time to remove all the old accounts that are eating up a lot of storage space also, but do not remove the default accounts.)

If you select the "content.xxx" entry in the left explorer window, you will see a whole bunch of subdirectories with names consisting of seven numbers and letters. Select all of these subdirectories in the right window and hit delete. When windows complains these are system folders, etc., say yes and delete them all. Internet Explorer will re-create new ones the next time you use it. Then you open the Temporary Internet files directory and select any thing that comes up in the right window and delete all these cookies also. Repeat for EACH user account that has a Local Settings subdirectory.

If you open these content directories first, you will find hundreds or even thousands of items in them, and this is why your system is so slow, it has to search through all of these cached values whenever is browses to se if it already has the cookie you need.

After you do all this, I highly recommend you go to

http://www.lavasoft.de

(NOTE: this is .DE, NOT .COM)and down load the adaware 6.0 program (free for home use), install it, and run it to clean out your registry, etc. of all the incidious little adware programs that have been installed by many of the web sites you have visited.

After having run adaware and cleaned out the system, next install SpyBot Search and Destroy (

http://www.safer-networking.org/index.php?page=download),

and run it to remove even more bot programs. I think you will be really surprised at all the garbage on your system, and it should run like it used to once you are done.

Have fun, and let us know how much it helps,

David Holbrook

 

[kiddpete]

You might also consider DISKKEEPER. It has a good rep for helping to speed up machines.