Problem with Computer running at below average Speed

[GWillford]

I have tried everything that I can think of. I am still having problems with my computer running at below normal speeds for example. I bought the SIMS2 the other day and it requires an 800 Mhz Processor mine is 1.7 Ghz it requires 256 Meg Ram I have 384 Megs and at least an 8 speed Cd drive I have a 48X. It ran so slow I couldn't do anything it was so Choppy and erratic that I finally decided to try loading it on my kids PC to see what would happen they have 256 megs of ram a 48X cd Drive and only a 450 Mhz Pentium 2 processor. Remember it requires at least an 800Mhz processor. The game runs perfectly with an occasional skip in the game play that is barely noticeable. Now please tell me how that is possible. Thank you in advance for your responses

 

[RealBlackStuff]

Do you have a real-time checking Antivirus program installed?

Also have a look in MSConfig, to see what programs are always running. If you can, report that here.

 

[GWillford]

I am running an Anti Virus Program AVG. Which has found viruses that Norton Antivirus 2004 Professional missed. I also checked MSConfig and disabled just about everything. Still having the same problem. I do appreciate the help though. I hope that sooner or later I am able to find the problem. The hard Drive seems run constantly also.

 

[RealBlackStuff]

When did you last do a Chkdsk and defrag, and how much space is free on that HD?
What is the size of your Pagefile.sys?

 

[GWillford]

I ran a Chkdsk just a few days ago I also did a complete boot Defrag. I ran defrag several times in the past few days hoping things would get better My page file is 1024 min 4096 Max I thank you very much for your time and effort

 

[GWillford]

Oh and the Hard Drive has about 14% left on a 60 Gig Drive

 

[RealBlackStuff]

That means that the harddisk is nearly full, you should always have about 15% free,, so programs can open/modify their temporary files while running.
I suggest you buy a 160-250GB HD with 8MB cache, from Seagate or Western Digital, seeing as they are cheap at the moment.
Then partition/format that new HD and move your pagefile from its current position to be the very first file on the first partiition of that new drive.
This is done somewhere in the HD management I think (I don't know XP) or perhaps under Virtual Memory in your System settings.
Set the pagefile to a fixed size of 1024MB min and 1024MB max (normally it would be about 1.5x your memory (384MB) which would make about 600MB, but you now have space galore).