Computer Running So Slow - Help!

[neild79]

i recently bought a pc from a friend + it was working fine, until a couple of weeks ago when i deleted something i shouldnt have + the computer wouldnt boot up. the computer didnt come with a copy of windows(more like it did but he kept it for himself) so i had to buy it seperately, i bought a new hard drive( 250GB 8MB SAMSUNG SP2504C) + installed windows onto it. that was about 2 weeks ago, ive since put a lot of songs, videos, + games onto the hard drive. every thing was fine until the other day when i tried to open my documents + it took about 5 mins to get into it. i checked the items on startup( + looked them up on bleepingcomputer to see what they meant) + now have about 5 on startup. but it still runs very slowly, sometimes when a new window opens, the old window takes ages to go away + does so a bit at a time. i went to control panel>system + it said my cpu was only 1.0GHz???? my specs are: amd athlon 64 k8 newcastle 1.6 - 2.4GHz, asrock k8upgrade vm800 socket 754 mobo, elixir 256mb ddr400 pc3200 184pin ram, 250GB 8MB samsung sp2504c hdd.....is my pc running slowly because of the lack of ram? + do i need to overclock my cpu? if so how do i do it? I WOULD REALLY APPRECIATE SOME HELP HERE AS I DONT KNOW WHAT TO MAKE OF THIS(i downloaded + ran sisoftwares sandra lite 2007 + it said my cpu was amd athlon 64 k8 newcastle 1.6-2.4GHz, but in system it says ONLY 1.0GHz.....THANK YOU FOR TAKING THE TIME TO READ THIS + HOPEFULLY YOUR HELP!!!!!!!!!

 

[Rick]

There's a good possibility your FSB is not set properly, since your CPU is being misreported.

You should enter the BIOS (press the [del] key on the very first screen you see when you boot the computer) and check to see if your computer is set properly. It might be in some sort of 'advanced configuration' menu.

You'll be looking to for your CPU's FSB speed, which should be set to 200MHz. If your FSB was set to 133MHz, then it should it would show up at about ~1GHz, so this seems likely.

 

[DelJo63]

...elixir 256mb ddr400 pc3200 184pin ram...

buy MORE ram. 512 will make a huge improvement.

also check your freespace

run chkdsk

then defrag (or at least determine the fragmentation; keep it <10%)