I have a three year old home PC with an Intel Celeron 2.00 GHz processor and running XP Professional Service Pack 2. It has became really slooooow in the past few days. Need some help speeding it back up. It's got a 40 GB hard drive and 31 GB are used and only 6 GB are free space. Could this be the problem?

Here is what I've done:
1. Emptied recycle bin
2. Emptied Deleted Items folder in Outlook
3. Deleted cookies and Temp internet Files in IE
4. Run Spybot and Ad Aware spy scans and "fixed" what they found
5. Inquired on Disk Clean Up. It says I can free up almost 10 GB by electing to compress files. I have no idea what the impact of compressing files would be. Should I do it?
6. Should I use the Disk Defragmenter tool? I used it on a previous home PC running Windows ME and ran into serious problems.

Any tips or pointers to good step by step tutorials to speed up this box without screwing it up?

TIA

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Behind every great man is a great woman. Behind every great woman is a great behind.

Easiest way to "speed" up a PC . . . add ram and get a faster hard drive.

run hijackthis, and see what you find - don't delete entries if you aren't sure.
I don't like to compress files.
Running the defragmenter won't hurt. (WinMe was terrible, I'm surprised it worked at all)
Have you run any other antivirus software?
What does your taskmanager say, as far as programs running in the background - anything suspicious/superfluous?

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It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so. Robert A. Heinlein


09 Jetta TDI
1985 300D

MTI is right, MEMORY

How much do you have, can you bump it up.

Defrag, yes, I run them regularly no issue's.

Compression, it works and is very good, but is consumes CPU.
Also saves disk IO time, but that is a different issue.
So I would consider (consider) compressing files or things you don't use often.

BUT
Slow down the last several ...

Sounds more like something else. Run a good AntiVirus and Spyware checker.
Trend (www.trendmicro.com) and spybot (???) are good examples.

Trend has an on-line scan, and you can sign up for their full service trial for 30 days. Ya they'll send a bunch of emails but it's worth it if it finds anything.

Note there are several out there. As a nerd I like Trend.

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KLK, MCSE

1990 500SL

I was always taught to respect my elders.
I don't have to respect too many people anymore.

Put a .45 round through the tower.

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1999 SL500
1969 280SE
2023 Ram 1500
2007 Tiara 3200

If its going slow all of a sudden, check the RAM consumption, if its high, do a scan with a quality anti virus like Anti Vir from www.free-av.com or Avast at www.avast.com, then download Super AntiSpyware from http://www.superantispyware.com/ get the free version and do an update to it and then scan, see how many rogues come crawling out of your system. A heavily fragged disk will cause slow access to your programs so defragging is necessary, you can either do it with built in defragger or get commercial or free defraggers the likes of Perfect Disk and JK Defragger.

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99 Gurkha with OM616 IDI turbo

2015 Gurkha with OM616 DI turbo

2014 Rexton W with OM612 VGT

After you've made sure your computer isn't part of somebody's bot farm do this:

>> Run CCleaner to clean up any junk - make sure you run the registry cleaner too.
>> Run the disk defrag tool (and do it once a month or so)
>> If you have less than 25% free space on your disk, get rid of those old videos you downloaded from somewhere
>> Run PageDefrag and defragment your registry

Links:

PageDefrag:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/pagedefrag.mspx

CCleaner:
http://www.ccleaner.com/

Both of these are FREE.

__________________
1984 300TD

pm PowerPig....

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"It's normal for these things to empty your wallet and break your heart in the process."
2012 SLK 350
1987 420 SEL

From what you've written - that it became slow rather suddenly in the past few days - I suspect spyware/malware. Unless you added some new software in that time? Spybot and AdAware are decent for detecting and removing some stuff but most spyware is tougher than that. It actively runs in the Windows system process and loads at startup, so you can't delete portions of it while Windows is running. You usually have to boot into safe mode, with no drivers loaded, in order to fully remove it. You usually have to do so manually. Spybot/AdAware will tell you they've 'cleaned up' the problem, but it will likely still be there. Try running it again after rebooting and you'll likely find the same culprit - reloaded and ready to annoy again.

Defragging, in my experience, only improves performance marginally.

When people tell me their computer is suddenly running slowly, and no other factors have changed, it is almost always spyware/malware. If it was running fine before, then it is not likely to be a hardware issue and adding more RAM may help, but will likely mask the real problem.

You could download hijackthis.exe as someone mentioned, run it, and post the log here, or PM it. I (or others) can take a look at it if you wish.

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Chris
2007 E550 4Matic - 61,000 Km - Iridium Silver, black leather, Sport package, Premium 2 package
2007 GL450 4Matic - 62,000 Km - Obsidian Black Metallic, black leather, all options
1998 E430 - sold
1989 300E - 333,000 Km - sold
1977 280E - sold
1971 250 - retired

"And a frign hat. They gave me a hat at the annual benefits meeting. I said. how does this benefit me. I dont have anything from the company.. So they gave me a hat." - TheDon

Super AntiSpyware lets you set boot mode and scan automatically, it also finds and removes what AdAware and Spybot can't, I strongly suggest you give it a try.

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99 Gurkha with OM616 IDI turbo

2015 Gurkha with OM616 DI turbo

2014 Rexton W with OM612 VGT

Thanks everyone. PC is at home and I won't get a chance to try any of your suggestions until tomorrow night, but I'll update everyone with what I find.

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Behind every great man is a great woman. Behind every great woman is a great behind.

Update: The PC ran much better before I had a chance to do any of your suggestions. So either the things I tried before I wrote here helped or, possibly my ISP (Roadrunner), was having some issues that slowed me down.

But I took some of your suggestions anyway and here are some comments:
- Looked at hijackthis but decided against running it because I wouldn't know how to differentiate what to delete and what to ignore. I may look again and post the results as Zeus suggested.
- Opened Task Manager. No unusual processes running in the Application tab. Tons of things listed in the Processes tab, but I don't know enough to figure out if any are problems.
- Did the Trend Micro House Call scan. It only found 6 generic grayware files which it said were ad trackers from sites like The Sporting News. I deleted them.
- Updated Spybot and Adaware and ran them again. Nothing new.
- Ran superantispyware and it didn't find anything new.

After re-reading your suggestions, I see I have some more work to do. BUt thanks for all of your help so far.

__________________


Behind every great man is a great woman. Behind every great woman is a great behind.

you mentioned you isp.seems over about the last couple months its been sporadic,most times it runs fine,but then others it slows down to a crawl.and sometimes it will kick me off the web totally.shows a (page can not be displayed).rebooting the modem will almost always bring it back up.