Windoz crawls, user dozes.

[ripit]

This is a call for help, but may possibly be a misplaced entry for the bitching and rants forum.

I have been looking after gf's machine. A brand new Toshiba satellite running XP pro (P4 2.0GHz, 512Mb). On taking delivery two months ago it was a fast efficient little unit. And then ...

Ok about 250Mb of patches and service packs later, the thing is running like shite. I was a bit picky with the downloads and only installed critical updates, relevant security patches and SP1. Managed to get AV updates and patches on time and remained virus free (doing better than my work's IT dept)

Now the question, is there anything I can do to restore some of the original performance of this machine?

Software on this machine is kept pretty slim, it runs a minimal install of MS office, Norton AV and ICQ. My gf uses it for writing, web and email.

[Colonel Kurtz]

one of the recent xp patches makes it crawl....

/insert "use Linux" statement here

put all the updates in and see what happens....

[ripit]

Ha ha.
Thanx Kurtz.

Did I make it really clear this is my GIRL friend's machine!

Whilst I may have a half built/baked linux box in my office, the chances of converting her, are slim to fuck all.
Secondly, as this is a laptop with all sorts on onboard accessories the though of finding and configuring linux drivers for the imbedded hardware is kind of daunting.

[royale]

How many partitions are there....had a similar problem last week and just tried the simple things first.

1) Move pagefile to another partition.
REBOOT
2) Defrag partition that pagefile WAS on
REBOOT
3) Move pagefile back to original partition
REBOOT.

If you only have a single partition, just try a defrag on it.
Very simple approach, but it did speed up my machine.

The other option is to get more RAM (>512Mb) and turn off virtual memory- did this on my home PC (1Gb DDR RAM) and it is now heaps faster.

[rickbitch]

Actually, Kurtz is right. There was a bug in one of the critical updates that made the OS crawl for some reason. It only affected a few machines, but a patch for it was released.

The other alternative for you is painful. Backup everything, put in the recovery disc (do compaq still use this?) and let it deal with it. AFAIK, the recovery disk will wipe everything off the drive and start again, and then apply all service packs and updates in one hit.

[Drakin]

Updates suck..

Please tell me you have removed all ticks in performance.
Thats control panel, system, advanced, performance, settings
then choose best performance (or manually untick the boxes)

Whee free speed!

[ripit]

arrhh. pulling my hair out.
I have added all updates plus SP1a and the bastard is even slower. There was mention of a bug with one of the updates according to MS knowledge base but it was specific to a HP machine.

I really don't want to reinstall this machine, its still brand new. Inset bitch about over priced bloat ware merchants.

Thank you to all for your assistance.

[golvellius]

I recall something about the MS Speech recognition engine or 'Agent' being enabled by default in XP, which began to make it crawl after a while....perhaps check that out?

[frenzie]

Originally posted by ripit
Ha ha.
Thanx Kurtz.

Did I make it really clear this is my GIRL friend's machine!

Whilst I may have a half built/baked linux box in my office, the chances of converting her, are slim to fuck all.
Secondly, as this is a laptop with all sorts on onboard accessories the though of finding and configuring linux drivers for the imbedded hardware is kind of daunting.

OH there are so many things wrong with that post i dont know where to start :P

Toshiba satelittes have got to be the most widely documented laptop for linux there is. I got a toshiba satelite 4300 running fine with debian.

One thing, of course new machines are gonna fly, that is until you install all the rest of the shit, the AV, other ready to run processes, check the task manager and see whats hogging resources.

[sortius]

Originally posted by frenzie
OH there are so many things wrong with that post i dont know where to start :P

Toshiba satelittes have got to be the most widely documented laptop for linux there is. I got a toshiba satelite 4300 running fine with debian.

One thing, of course new machines are gonna fly, that is until you install all the rest of the shit, the AV, other ready to run processes, check the task manager and see whats hogging resources.

frenzie does have a point... dont forget aswell, it is a laptop, dont run it like a desktop and you'll see a difference.

a few things I suggest:
1. check for any rouge processes by going to the processes in taskmanager
2. check your startup apps: start | all programs | startup, registry keys...
3. format, install 2k... see if that fixes your speed problems
4. install linux, as suggested,
then, if all else fails,
5. pack the laptop up in it's box and send it back to the manufacturer... PEBCAK