Slow Bootup And Shut Down

[badassben]

hello

I have a HP 7945 with Intel Pentium 4 1.5ghz, 512mb SDRAM, 40gb 5400rpm, 128mb Geforce Fx 5600 Ultra, Soundblaster live sound card running Windows XP.

My startup is dreadfully slow, i mean really slow. It starts up on the blue hp screen, then goes on to the normal windows xp screen(1min) then going into windows is just awful. It takes absolutly ages for you actually able to click on anything.

It might have something to do with i have around 1gb hard drive left, but should be upgrading to a maxtor 200gb 7,200rpm. I don't really have any big programmes in the system tray i have the following; volume, safety hardware removal, Norton Ghost 2003, Msn Messenger, Norton Anti Virus 2003, Norton Internet Security 2003 and AOL Instant Messenger.

All those programmes start up with Windows and also shut down with it to. I don't think its memory.

My other prob is in windows.

Everything basically stops responding ive got rid of rubbish of it and its still going really slow. One thing that is strange is if you right click on the taskbar u can select what toolbars you can have and ZTa is selected don't know what it does but its selected so i decide to deselect it and it does i go back on to check if its deselected and its still selected so then i deselect it and "WE HAVE A PROBLEM" It says WINDOWS EXPLORER (desktop) has caused an error and needs to close. I have virus scanned my hard drive and nothings there. I have 400,000 files and it took 2hr 33mins to do it.

Can someone please help. I hacven't a clue what is wrong with it

Thanks

Ben

 

[RealBlackStuff]

Your HD is definitely overloaded.

Have you done the obvious things, e.g. clean up your TEMP directory, delete your internet cache-files, all .TMP files etc?

You don't need Ghost to start with your PC, only start it when needed.

If you have e.g. loads of .MP3 files, try to ZIP them, then delete the files that you put in those zips. Do the same with all your .DOC files, images like .JPG etc.

If you have huge Ghost-files, delete the older ones you won't need any more.

Finally, run CHKDSK and then do a defrag (overnight).

Let us know what the result is.... and definitely get more HD-space!!

 

[StormBringer]

If you have 1GB free on a 40GB disk, I don't think a defrag will be possible until you free up a bit of space. There is a minimum of free space in order to run defrag. It has to have a certain amount of overhead in order to move the files around.

Some things to do:
Put any files you don't use frequently onto CDs, might want to also burn vids and audio to CDs as well, except maybe stuff you listen to frequently. Then delete the copies on your HDD(after varifying the copies are good)
Search for *.tmp and delete all you find. find and delete any duplicate files(there are utilities that can help with that)

 

[acidosmosis]

Suggestions:

1. CTRL+ALT+DEL and close any programs that are running. By any I mean anything and everything that Windows will let you close except for Explorer. The reason your doing this is to stop all programs from running to give you some room to work and do the following.

2. Download Ad-Aware and scan your hard drive. This will find any spyware, adware, etc. Them remove any that it finds.

3. Do as Stormbringer said and move some files over to CD. Your going to need about 15% free space to be able to Defrag. Then do a defrag.

4. Do a search on www.google.com for the keywords "optimize" and "windows". Read up on that subject.

5. If startup is slow you need to try removing startup items to see if that fixes your problem so go to Start, Run and type "msconfig", then click Startup and uncheck all items on the list. Restart and see if that makes a difference. If "msconfig" doesn't work then you can download software to optimize Windows startup.

There are a few suggestions you can try. Though there are other ways of fixing your problems. Let us know what this does for you .

 

[lalaji]

another thing is after you defrag, you can also defrag your boot files. Go to the command prompt and type defrag c: -b to optimize your boot files to speed up your boot process. Heres a little article from TechTV about defrags from the command line.
http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/windowstips/story/0,24330,3402424,00.html

 

[mvhw]

slow comp

If you have installed all the updates for XP Service Pack 2, this may be your problem. My comp slowed down dramatically when I installed the updates from msoft, so I formatted my hard drive and installed XP SP1 and turned off automatic updates (right-click on My Computer and go to Properties and Automatic Updates. Uncheck "keep my computer up to date"
I have also found that Norton Antivirus slowed down my comp some.
Good luck.