XP slow all the way around

Trying to help out good ole Grandfather. He has a HP 1.4g Celeron running XP Home , Large HD size ? lot of ram ? The unit is maybe a year old.
Takes everybit of 3 to 4 min to boot up. And operations seem slow to me, but I am not all that familiar with XP myself. He tells me he is keeping up with the defrag, and virus scan. I saw on another board that some thought there could be a conflict with MS Messenger? I did notice that he had it loaded on his confuzer. HP did not feel it necessary to send a XP disk with his computer so Reformat is kinda out the window isn't it? He said he has used the restore or whatever XP has on it to go back in time.
Any Ideas where to start on this one? Thanks DS

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Originally Posted by kcfansallee

Trying to help out good ole Grandfather. He has a HP 1.4g Celeron running XP Home , Large HD size ? lot of ram ? The unit is maybe a year old.
Takes everybit of 3 to 4 min to boot up. And operations seem slow to me, but I am not all that familiar with XP myself. He tells me he is keeping up with the defrag, and virus scan. I saw on another board that some thought there could be a conflict with MS Messenger? I did notice that he had it loaded on his confuzer. HP did not feel it necessary to send a XP disk with his computer so Reformat is kinda out the window isn't it? He said he has used the restore or whatever XP has on it to go back in time.
Any Ideas where to start on this one? Thanks DS

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Are you running Nortons A/V ......big big resource hog try it with out

size of harddrive and ram would help;but if its as slow as you say how about running ad-aware or spyware search and destroy.

Call HP and demand a restore CD, I believe you just pay the shipping.

Escape_Driver : Glad you asked, yes he has Norton, and just recently updated to 2004. Now you say, try without, disable or what? thanks.

blink : I am pretty sure it is an 80Gb hd, and 256mb ram

NooNoo : I will look into this, thanks. Both Grandfather and Father have these XP's without OS disks. I will tell them about this. Sure the restore is nice, but what happens when something happens to the HD or something like that.

Thanks to all DS

Quote:

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Originally Posted by kcfansallee

Escape_Driver : Glad you asked, yes he has Norton, and just recently updated to 2004. Now you say, try without, disable or what? thanks.

blink : I am pretty sure it is an 80Gb hd, and 256mb ram

NooNoo : I will look into this, thanks. Both Grandfather and Father have these XP's without OS disks. I will tell them about this. Sure the restore is nice, but what happens when something happens to the HD or something like that.

Thanks to all DS

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Do an uninstall on nortons and keep it off line while you try it... P.S. I love Norton A/V but it slows down computers SOOOO much.

Would try this but he opted for the online download. So he does not have the Norton disc.?. He said it took half the afternoon to do that. Really don't want to get into that.

Kcfansallee:

Windows XP should fully startup in about 45 - 50 seconds. 3 - 4 minutes is way too long.

Trimming down the startup load in the MSCONFIG startup tab and trimming down the number of programs set to "Automatic" in the SERVICES list will go a long ways towards shortening the startup time.

Yep..clean out any unnecessary items in ms config..run spybot and/or adaware..do a disk cleanup from accessories/system tools and then defrag. Also, there is a hidden partition on these HP's that does a full restore or a format restore..directions are in the documents he got with the computer..if I remember correctly, you hold down f10 at bootup? Although as you say, this does not help if the hard drive gets cooked.

Try running a disk check ,I have run into this problem with NAV and XP PRO. for some unknown reason(at least to us) the system will just slow down ,takes several minutes to load OS and once your up, Control Panel,My computer,Etc all are very slow to respond. I'm not sure what causes this but Disk Check seems to correct it.

Try running MS's boot tool. It will scan the boot process and give you recommendations on what to do to improve boot up time. Make sure all the updates are done from Windows Update. System Restore is equally a big resource hog as is Norton's. I'd also run some sort of spyware detector and get it scan by some online virus scanner tool as well (www.antivirus.com).

Here's the link to ms's boot tool http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/...t/BootVis.mspx


This is why I never buy HP (or dell or gateway for that matter) computers. No windows cd? Do as noonoo said, call them up and demand a restore CD.