system crawls like a snail

[docweiser]

g31m-s dual quad 2.66 ghz 8 gig ram XP sata 3.0 with 32bit enabled - tried every tweak program I could find, defrag everything! It has to be something with my board. It takes up to 5 minutes for a program to load.

Any help is appreciated.

[wazza300]

Re: system crawls like a snail

what ram and hdd are you using? could be your hdd thats slow?

[parsec]

Re: system crawls like a snail

I'll run through the things that come to mind, you may have done at least some of them already.

When is the last time you re-installed XP? A pain at times, I know, but it will accomplish 100% of the cleanup tasks at once. What SATA chipset do you have, SATA mode (IDE, AHCI?), and SATA driver? Are your drives SATA or PATA? Are your HDDs really SATA 3Gb/s capable? Have you run a Windows disk cleanup? Cleaned up old Windows restore points (via a disk cleanup option?)

Updating drivers may help, what is the exact make and model of your board? Your CPU being "dual quad 2.66 ghz" does not make sense, is it a Core 2 Quad, Core 2 Duo, or what? Official Intel model number please, such as Core 2 Quad Q8300.

Search for CCleaner and download (free), run its cleaner on Windows and applications. Before running the cleaner, go into its Options and click the Cookies button. Move entries from websites you care about to the Cookies to Keep side (drag and drop), otherwise they will be deleted.

Run the registry cleaner, backup the registry when it asks you to, and run the registry cleaner. If that causes problems, restore the registry with the backup.

In its Tools section, run the Startup feature, and see how many worthless things are running in the background that do nothing. Disable rather than remove things you are uncertain about, so you can enable them if disabling causes problems. This can be a major fix.

Go into your BIOS and either save your current settings in a profile if it has that capability, or if not write them down. Shutdown and remove power from the PC, open it up and move the jumper to clear the BIOS/CMOS, and also remove the boards battery for a few minutes. Replace battery, move jumper back, close it up and boot it up. Go into the BIOS and either restore your profile, or change the settings you use. Check the boot order and put your OS drive first.

32 bit XP will only use 3GB - 4GB of memory, a limitation of a 32 bit OS. Your other 4GB is doing nothing, unless you have a RAM drive. Find a program that will show you how much memory is being used (HWiNFO32, free), and run it and see if you have free memory.

When Windows 8 comes out in October, consider upgrading from XP. But understand that Windows 8 is night and day from XP, research that and decide if you can live with it. Only $40 until 1/1/2013. Is your PC 64 bit capable? If so, go with a 64bit OS.

I assume you have a anti-virus program. If not, search for Microsoft Security Essentials (free), download and run.

[wazza300]

Re: system crawls like a snail

yeah thats right,max of 3.5gb is usable with xp 32bit,it still should feel and load things fast though but a 64bit os would help no end