Computer running REALLY slow

I've heard the same complaint several times recently and the one thing they all had in common was the current version of the free AVG anti-virus; that thing is a cpu hog upon start-up. Are you using the same?

Otherwise there could be so many things going on that can cause a slow boot-up. Take a look at the Performance and Processes tabs of your Task Manager to see what's eating up your resources.

 

There are a lot of reasons a computer will run slow. Because your situation is one where it is suddenly running slower (rather than slowly getting slower over a longer period of time), there are a handful of things you should check:

First thing to check is a full scan for viruses and spyware. Make sure your scanning tools have the latest updates in them.

Is your disk heavily fragmented or close to running out of free space? Run the defrag tool just in case. Look at the free space available?

In Windows, look at all the programs and processes that are running. Click in the lower right "Notification Area" of the windows main screen layout. The "<<" arrows will open up the tray and show you icons for the active processes/programs. Are any of them new? Any of them not needed (like AIM)? Close down all the ones not needed and see if that speeds things up. If yes, then find out how to keep them from being launched at start time.

Another issue is running out of RAM memory space. Is something new taking up a lot of RAM? A newer version of one of your programs perhaps? You may need to buy more RAM for your PC.

Hope these few ideas help.

 

Do you have it configured for automatic file synchronization? If so then it's trying scan all of the files for updates/changes which will cause the slowdown. Try disabling the sync until you're ready.

 

Why do you have it plugged in all the time?

Also, are you using a desktop search like windows desktop search or google desktop? This will keep tracking it constantly. Remove it. It just drags and drags and drags.

For the record, some other things that can contribute to a system running slow: lots of files in a particular directory, lots of fonts - say... over 600 will start to make a system crawl.

You can also increase boot times on windows xp systems by downloading/installing and using BootVIS, which was a Microsoft utility which was pulled by them but still floats out there on download sites.

 

I would only see the reason to keep it plugged in if he isn't syncing and is only syncing manually so he can play the mp3's from his ipod on his desktop. But if he's syncing all the time... doesn't make sense. The files would be local as well as on the ipod.

 

Doesn't need to be charge that much. The external drive... it is USB eh? Which is... slow and if you are syncing files on it, that will be your answer.

 

My point exactly. If there are a lot of files the sync app needs to hit each one. In this case it sounds like a triple latency problem; laptop, ipod and ext (usb) storage.

 

Chris, did you resolve this yet? If so, what was the fix?

 

You can always take your ipod off of sync and do manual updates. That means you'll need to add things via drag and drop and remove things from your ipod via right click delete. Works well, if you have a large collection that is. But if you depend on syncing, it might not be for you.