Slow PC!

[Man in the Funny Hat]

These days it runs really, really slowly. If I right click on a file, it takes nearly 30 seconds of the hars drive whitting away to populate the right click menu. If I hit "show desktop", the open windows will actually take about 10 seconds to disappear. Shutting the PC down take about 5 minutes.

I'm no expert but my default assumption would normally be memory leaks or hogs somewhere.

I have almost nothing running in the background, according to Task Manager.

Of course WHAT is running and what it's doing is probably more important than how many different processes are running. My own suggestions would be to start "msconfig" in the run menu, and see what's REALLY starting up with your PC. Start turning off stuff that you don't need running like quicktime, automatic downloads, control centers for graphic and audio cards, MS Office startups, and all that kind of junk. If you turn off anything you can't live without just run msconfig again and turn it back on.

Also, for the shutdown delay, do a google search for faster XP shutdown. There's a registry entry that controls how long the Windows shutdown routine waits for programs to shut themselves down before it shuts them down forcibly. By default I think it's set to 20000 and setting it to something like 1000 or even 500 does WONDERS for a faster Windows shutdown.

 

[RuminDange]

Also mapped network drives, short-cuts in the recent used documents folder, and the microsoft indexing service that runs in the background can also cause you a slow down. Look under Services for Indexing Service and set it to manual or disabled. This is supposely to help search your hard drive for stuff but it constantly trys to update itself with every little change.

Sysinternals.com has a lot of good tools to help find and diagnosis these kinds of things.

Good luck.

RD

 

[CarlZog]

Windows has a nasty habit of getting slower with time, especially if you do a lot of installs and uninstalls of applications.

I've heard this before, but I don't understand it. Why does this happen?

Carl

 

[talmar]

Also, make sure you have enough hard drive space to support your virtual memory settings. If you have plenty of hard drive space try setting you virtual memory higher.

Your pathing statements as well. If you have a lot of destinations in your pathing statements that can slow down your system.

Sometimes a corrupt profile will cause your system to slow down. Try creating a new user and log into the system as a new user. That will create a new profile for that user. If your system runs fine under the new user then it's a profile issue.

 

[Morrus]

Morrus, if you check the system tray (down by the clock) do you see a lot of icons there? If your system is slowing down, but you're spyware free, you probably just have a lot of junk programs running. Realplayer, quicktime, winamp, printers, desktop search - all kinds of programs dump supposedly "helpful" things in your system tray, and they make your system run like crap. Many of these things can be turned off (winamp), but some have to be manually removed (Realplayer).

No, no - I'm not at that basic a level! I know where the system tray is and how to use it. There's very little running. I do keep the think pretty clean.

 

[Morrus]

My own suggestions would be to start "msconfig" in the run menu, and see what's REALLY starting up with your PC. Start turning off stuff that you don't need running like quicktime, automatic downloads, control centers for graphic and audio cards, MS Office startups, and all that kind of junk. If you turn off anything you can't live without just run msconfig again and turn it back on.

Sorry, I probably wasn't clear in my original post. I've got all that sort of stuff well in hand. That's why I'm so flummoxed!

 

[Morrus]

Also, make sure you have enough hard drive space to support your virtual memory settings. If you have plenty of hard drive space try setting you virtual memory higher.

I'll give that a shot!

Your pathing statements as well. If you have a lot of destinations in your pathing statements that can slow down your system.

Ah, now you've gone beyond my competence level. Could you explain what I need to do there?

Sometimes a corrupt profile will cause your system to slow down. Try creating a new user and log into the system as a new user. That will create a new profile for that user. If your system runs fine under the new user then it's a profile issue.

Sounds like a long shot, but certainly worth trying - thanks!

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

I've heard this before, but I don't understand it. Why does this happen?

Carl

The goddamned registry.

Once crap gets put into the registry, it's almost impossible to clean it out again-- even when you uninstall.

 

[andargor]

My laptop is driving me nuts!

These days it runs really, really slowly. If I right click on a file, it takes nearly 30 seconds of the hars drive whitting away to populate the right click menu. If I hit "show desktop", the open windows will actually take about 10 seconds to disappear. Shutting the PC down take about 5 minutes.

I just reread your post and something clicked.

I was having terrible performance in Windows Explorer when right-clicking, and at one point it would hang.

This was due to shell extensions being installed by applications (WinZip, etc.) in the right-click menu.

The solution was using ShellExView to remove shell extensions from my menu. In my case, the culprit was PGP, but it can be anything.

Disable any extensions that you don't often use when right-clicking, and hopefully it should do the trick.

Andargor

 

[Morrus]

I just reread your post and something clicked.

I was having terrible performance in Windows Explorer when right-clicking, and at one point it would hang.

This was due to shell extensions being installed by applications (WinZip, etc.) in the right-click menu.

The solution was using ShellExView to remove shell extensions from my menu. In my case, the culprit was PGP, but it can be anything.

Disable any extensions that you don't often use when right-clicking, and hopefully it should do the trick.

Andargor

Wow. That certainly helped with the slow context menu problem. Thank you!

I have noticed that the "Send To >" option in the context menu is always very slow. I never, ever use it, but can't identify what to disable for that particular entry. I tried Microsoft Send To Shell Extension, but that didn't disable it. Any ideas?