I have a eMachine T4480 that we recently resurrected from a year long "sabbatical" after we got a Dell laptop. One of the reasons we bought the laptop was that the T4480 was acting very sluggish and would hang for a long time when opening programs or browser windows to the point where we could barely use it. The obvious concern was a virus or spyware but we were unable to find anything using various scanners and searches. Several weeks ago I pulled out the T4480 box and did a fresh install along with installation of Windows OneCare. I'm running XP Home SP2, Office 2007, Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird and several other programs (Dreamweaver Suite, Roxio Creator & Microsoft Picture It!) All windows updates are installed automatically and I have several printers that I can swap out as required depending on requirements ie laser, photo. I also have a couple of external HD's that I use for backup and storage. Any idea what is causing this problem and how to correct it?? I've thought of upgrading the RAM to the max 2gb but other than that I have no idea what to do>
Or you could download CCleaner. It will clean up unnecessary files and clean your registry.
www.ccleaner.com
Yea i would upgrade to the 2gb ram. 512meg is not going to be very fast. Especially if you like to store lots of music and files. I see the person up there told you to run a dfrag. I have run windows defragger a couple of times, but there are better tools to defrag with. I use defraggler.
www.defraggler.com
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There are some settings in XP that may help. A memory upgrade would be nice, but try running the defrag program on it first. Using the Windows Explorer, right-click on the C: drive and select Properties. The defragger is on the Tools tab. It will take a bit of time to run, but when finished can speed up your system quite a bit. Also, there's a button on the General tab for Disk Cleanup. You may want to avoid using it because it will compress some files, but it finds really old files that haven't been accesses in a long time and compresses them. It gives you a report. As far as perofrmance, you can right-click on the "My Computer" icon on your desktop and select Properties. On the advanced tab, there is a Performance button. You can pick and choose the visual effects that you have turned on, but the more that's turned on, the slower it runs. This is more on the immediate response thing rather than making a program start up faster. On the Advanced tab, you can tell it to run programs or background services. Selecting programs will help. The Virtual memory can also improve performance of programs, but it will use hard drive space for that. If you click on Change, you can select which hard drive and how much space to use in most any combination. Another thing to check is the icons on the right side near the clock. These are programs that are running in memory all the time. If you aren't using a feature, or only use it occasionally, you can usually right-click on the icon and select options and tell it not to load during startup. You can usually exit the program, too.
Hmm. Tougher question. Well, you can try running the Task Manager (right-click on the task bar on the bottom and select it. Select Processes and make sure "Show processes from all users" is checked. Click on the CPU column and it will show the programs that use the most amount of CPU. Note that the programs will move up and down a lot, but there may be one or two that are always near the top/bottom (depending on how it's sorted). Look up those programs through the search engine of your choice and see if you can do without them running or if they aren't recognized. These programs are usually started from the Services section of the Control panel, so stopping one won't necessarily stop it starting up the next time until you set it to Manual or Disabled in Services. If it's still sluggish, it might be worth it to get more memory. However, if you've got 1GB and want to get 2GB, there may not be that much of an improvement. If you can go to 4GB or higher, go for it. Memory is pretty cheap now.
OK. The memory upgrade would be best to do. The battery shouldn't have any affect on the system other than at some point if you power off the computer it will forget the BIOS settings and/or the date. That can be a hassle if you don't remember all the little settings that make it work. One last suggestion is to look at some of the BIOS settings. If you have the manual for the motherboard, or can download it from the manufacturer's site, look to see if you can improve performance by using shadow cache. Check for BIOS settings that are specific to XP (maybe none). If you are using a built-in video, once you upgrade your memory, see if you can give your video card more memory through BIOS. Other things to consider is if you motherboard supports SATA, upgrade your HD to SATA. You should see an improvement of speed using SATA. Most new drives come with software (WD, MAXSTOR and Seagate do) that lets you transfer your old system to the new HD without losing anything. Right now, SATA drives are cheaper than IDE. That's about it for tweaking. A last resort would be to reinstall the OS, but it is a whole lot of hassle doing that.
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I've tried your suggestions and still no luck....any other suggestions?
Ok...so Iopened up Task Manager and set it to display both the CPU usage as wellas the Mem Usage. The system is usually running about 64 -91 free yetthe biggest Mem users are consuming vitually no CPU ie 3-5 CPU with14,656 - 16, 252 K Mem Usage.....I'm currently running with 512mg ram(OEM) but have 2 GB new ram that can be installed (this is the max thisunit will take). I removed Windows Live OneCare after I found that thesoftware seems to be conflicting with something else on the system -although I run it with most of the same programs on other pc's withoutany problem. The system seems a bit better but still not running the way it should be. I've never changed the CMOS battery - is there anypossibility it should be replaced on this nearly 5 year old pc?or anyother hardware issues and if so, how do I go about troubleshooting? There doesn't appear to be any hardware problems according to Device Manager though?? Alot of times I'll click on something and nothing happens for thelongest time...other times I have to click on it again or wait forsomething to happen. This is very frustrating as it never did this before...
Ok...so I opened up Task Manager and set it to display both the CPU usage as well as the Mem Usage. The system is usually running about 64 -91 free yet the biggest Mem users are consuming vitually no CPU ie 3-5 CPU with 14,656 - 16, 252 K Mem Usage.....I'm currently running with 512mg ram (OEM) but have 2 GB new ram that can be installed (this is the max this unit will take). I removed Windows Live OneCare after I found that the software seems to be conflicting with something else on the system - although I run it with most of the same programs on other pc's without any problem. The system seems a bit better but still not running the way it should be. I've never changed the CMOS battery - is there any possibility it should be replaced on this nearly 5 year old pc?or any other hardware issues and if so, how do I go about troubleshooting? There doesn't appear to be any hardware problems according to Device Manager though?? A lot of times I'll click on something and nothing happens for the longest time...other times I have to click on it again or wait for something to happen. This is very frustrating as it never did this before...
I'm already running ccleaner on a regular basis so that's not helping....will try the new ram and see what happens. Stay tuned.
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