What to do next?

[Daniel Zaharia]

For some time now, my computer from home became slow, very slow. It is a Celeron at 800 Mhz (initially I could over clock it to 1Ghz (now I can’t do this anymore :confused: ; I don’t know why!)), with 512 Mb RAM. First I thought the problem came from Windows (I didn’t reinstalled it for 2 years ) and i've overwritten it with a new installation. After that, I've scanned it for viruses(with BitDefender), and apart from 3 or 4 files with a Trojan (that have been also removed), nothing. I've defragment and checked the disk for bad sectors. Can this be a hardware problem? What to do next?

[David Cunningham]

Try using SiSandra to find the bottleneck: http://www.sisoftware.net/[^] David

[Daniel Zaharia]

Thanks!

[Giles]

If you are using Windows XP, turn off the system restore feature. I find it slows things down quite a bit as you put more onto the machine.

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"Je pense, donc je mange." - Rene Descartes 1689 - Just before his mother put his tea on the table. Shameless Plug - Distributed Database Transactions in .NET using COM+

[Daniel Zaharia]

Yes, now i have Windows Xp, but before i had Windows 2000. Thanks for the tip!

[ekolis]

I read just the other day on another forum that letting Windows manage your virtual memory can slow down your machine drastically as it constantly adjusts the size of your swap file. Try setting it to a fixed size of twice your physical RAM instead, and make sure you defrag before you do. (Thanks to David Gervais for the tip! :))

[Joe Woodbury]

System Restore only slows boot times. It otherwise doesn't do anything. Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke

[Joe Woodbury]

This is a misconception carried over from Windows 3.x. It does not apply to XP. The size of the swap file is not adjusted downward. It is only increased if demand requires it. Under normal circumstances, this has no impact on the performance of XP. (If the swap file is being increased, that in and of itself has little performance impact; that you are now demand swapping a lot of data does have an impact.) Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke