Slow Computer Fixing

I just worked on someone's Dell P4 that was heading for the dump. All they do is internet surf, store photos, email. It felt like wearing concrete boots and I wondered if there was hope. It does make you appreciate dual/quad core. The hard drive was continually thrashing, it would hang for minutes, everything was slow motion.

I did the standard tweaks of old for XP - little improvement. It didn't appear to have a virus but Spybot did remove 5 spyware offerings, still small improvement. CCleaner, JKDefrag, I finally thought to check the hard drive for UDMA and it was PIO so I changed cable, no win so reverted to old cable. Then I uninstalled the controller driver and rebooted x2. It recognized DMA and improved more but not happy. Uninstalled the second controller driver to check but no big difference.

Tried to update the system drivers. One would think the original drivers would be fine because it was all original Dell but the OS had been updated to SP3 and beyond. I used the Dell update chipset driver without much improvement. I ran Spinrite over night had more improvement but I couldn't tell what Spinrite did because it was done but locked up in the morning. The thing had only 512 RAM so I tried 2x512. Better but not enough to donate the RAM so I reverted to 512.

Finding motherboard drivers newer than Dell's took awhile. Google is hopeless for most drivers because of all the scams out there trying to pick you off by offering free downloads and then trying to charge for an actual download. Sure, I'm going to pay for an Intel driver. I used the Intel driver search page with the driver name reported from a few free system reporting programs. Actually DriverAgent does a fair job of reporting out of date drivers but I just use it for the report. Then I find the driver some other way. Anywho, the new motherboard (chipset) drivers did wonders. I know, why is that surprising? I say again, it was original equipment. Was something in Windows SP3 not liking the old drivers? The Windows drivers for that motherboard may have been fine too but I was not doing a fresh install if I didn't have to.

It was good enough for my surfing friend but it would have driven me nuts. I had already uninstalled everything I though might be a problem. At least HDTune reported the hard drive was scoring 45-50 and not 1-3. I decided to deep 6 AVG and bingo the thing came alive. Not that AVG typically would be a problem but I suppose it was an old install and something had gone south. Installed Microsoft Security Essentials with no speed drop.

Now it works as well as a P4 is going to work. Sure I did a bunch of other tweaks from days gone by. I could use it without screaming. But the moral is every slow computer is not always only burdened with crapware, although plenty are. I'm not sure there is a good checklist and I approach it like herding cats. I'm no tech. (it had already been at the tech.)

Computer behavior usually gives you the direction of where the problem is. Hard drive thrashing was definitely a key. I assumed the small RAM was causing much of the thrashing. The tech. wanted to put in a new hard drive and that would have been a disappointment. An older system will probably have several issues but it should still be able to keep a surfer happy.

Could it have been something else? Certainly, but then different symptoms would have been prominent.