Suggestions for a PC gone crazy!

DavidNW

DavidNW

Big Geek
Hi,

A friend of mine's desktop running XP is taking (so he says) around a staggering 10 minutes to fully boot into Windows! When it finally gets there, there are errors with just about any application he tries to run.

Clicks on Outlook Express, and a different program opens. His web browser barely loads at all. He gets low memory error messages, and well, the lists just goes on. He has run Avast and it came up clean. Ran Spybot and just had a couple of bits of adware; which have now been deleted, but still no difference!

I told him to run scandisk and see if it throws up any errors and also run Memtest, as it could be a memory related problem. Any additional thoughts on the problem would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

David.
 
With this kind of performance, a reinstall is probably going to be painful at best (it would be hard to backup all data if not only a part of it).

low memory, you say? maybe the Virtual Memory should be set to be managed by the OS, instead of a pre-set value? I know that to cause problems. That would be worth checking out.

The other thing is to try and get better response times by disabling startup services and programs (Run>msconfig>startup). After that is done, use CCleaner to weed some trash stuff out - from the temp folders as well as the registry.

If none of that helps, well, probably the first paragraph of my reply will need applying...

good luck
 
fullt format and fresh install is probably the best method. But I would first of all slave your hard drive in a spare machine and run HD Tune or HD Tache and check the hard drive for read speeds, you should be averaging out around 35-45MB/s but all depends on what disk your using.
 
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