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dell slow

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techun

Member
Joined
Jul 29, 2004
I hope that this is the right forum, but you guys seem nice, so i hope it'll be ok..

I'm 15, so i don't have much money..lol..not enough for a computer, but since my mom uses my sister's other laptop now, i get the dell, it's a 2350, no agp slot..lol...
2.2 p4
512 ram 256 added since i bought it
fx5200...best for pci..lol
and a 30 gig hdd..i dunno what else to put


It's so slow..i thought it was from adding a video card, made to much heat that it couldn't get rid of, but i have had the side off and a like...10" fan blowing in, it's still bad. Everything is slow..and it's slow compared to our celeron 2 ghz laptop, it should be faster, right? Do i need to reformat (like..14 months old), how much virtual memory should I have? I don't really game, just browse oc forums and IM, but when it take so long just to load yahoo messenger..lol..also, when i click control panel, the icons appear..like one at a time..

my hdd is 2/3 full, funno if that matters
 
a reformat never hurts after you've had the same old for a while, i notice that mine tends to bog down after about 3-4 months. i usually leave the page file at the default windows settings but set it to whatever you think is a good number, i think the recommed was like setting it to 1.5 times the ammount of ram you have but i wouldn't quote me on that.

IMPORTANT: make sure you back up everything you want to save before you reformat otherwise you will find yourself in a very bad mood.
 
Sounds like a software bog to me... A reformat would probably be great for the system, but if you don't want to mess with backing up all your stuff, this should get you back to like-new again:

First, go into control panel and add/remove programs, and uninstall anything you no longer use, or anything that you don't remember installing that doesn't belong there.

Then I would download and run these free utilities from major geeks:

Sypbot search and destroy - update to latest definitions before running
Lavasoft Adaware - update before running
CCleaner (crapcleaner)

The first two will remove spyware that your family system is surely infected with from the past 14 months (unless you have been managing that already). The last one will clear out, most likely, hundreds of megabytes of temp files that might be slowing things down.

Then you should run a registry cleaner, like regsupreme or jv16 powertools, as the registry is probably a bit of a mess from the past year and everything you just did.

Once you have done all that, you should run the windows disk defragmenter, to put all your files back together from all the deletions and random fragments over time.

Make sure you have virus software, and that it is updated. If you need a free one, AVG is alright.

Everything I've mentioned is available for free from www.majorgeeks.com.
 
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yeah i've taken care of spyware and viruses, they were my first guess
i think i should be asking how to reformat
 
If you have the original CD's that came with the sytem, (system recovery CD's) you can likely just stick them in the CD drive and boot, and you will get the option to format and reinstall (I know HP's recovery disks do this very simply).

Otherwise, if you have a windows CD... all you need to do is boot to it, then format over the old installation and reinstall.

How sure are you that the system is clean? A PC with those specs should not be that slow unless infected. :-/
 
After you installed the PCI video card, did you disable the onboard video chip from within the BIOS (if that's even a possibility on a Dell)? I'm thinking that it's not possible to disable the onboard chip, and there's a conflict between the chip and the PCI video card you installed.

If the above isn't the case...did you happen to use the same video drivers that were previously installed (possibly an older version that's not compatible w/ your new card), or did you uninstall them first before installing the new card? Did you then install the latest Nvidia compatible drivers for the 5200? Also, which OS are you running...XP Home? In addition, which video drivers do you have installed?
 
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it said it cannot continue because a newer vesion was installed (sp2?)

(edit thank goodness i did, i had two papers due friday on it that i didn't print out!! :santa: )
 
If you have a faster internet connection you can always get a boot cd from here and use that to clean off your hard drive and then use the windows cd to reinstall.
 
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