AboutKarl Zick Expertise Can answer questions on most aspects of PC hardware and software. I build them, program them, fix them, upgrade them, etc. LAN and internet literate. Visit my free web site at www.kzconsulting.net.
Experience Previous USAF Colonel and Aerospace engineer. Professional PC consultant for the past 8 years. Client database of over 70 businesses and individuals.
New web site address is www.kzconsulting.info.
I have a Dell XPS 420 running Windows Vista Home Premium. The processor is an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, E8200 @ 2.66Ghz. It has 6GB of RAM with a 64-bit operating system. I have a 331GB hard drive with 68Gb used.
My issue is the speed of the computer. I do not have much installed to the computer. I do not use it for downloading movies etc. I do not use programs such as Napster, Limewire, or any other type of those programs that may let viruses, spyware,etc onto the system. I run my anti virus software everyday and have never had any problems other than the speed. When I say speed, I mean if I have 3 windows of Internet Explorer open to different websites and then I try to open Microsoft Word, it takes between 15 - 30 seconds for Word to open. It took less time on my old Dell Dimension that only had 2GB of RAM. If I go to a website to watch a streaming television show and then try to open Microsoft Mail, again.....another 15 - 30 seconds. When I press the power button to turn the PC on, from the time I push the button to the time that I can actually move the mouse to where I want it to go is almost 90 seconds. I have gone into MSCONFIG and then the startup tab and out of 33 entries I only have 8 checked. I have changed my visual effects to "Adjust for best performance" and I have tried playing around with the virtual memory "paging files" but that didn't help so I set it back to let windows manage it for me.
I am out of ideas. Any advise, or is this normal and I am just expecting too much?
Thanks,
Paul
Answer Hi Paul,
With the specs on your computer, it should be flying out the window. You have already done the basics like eliminating background programs, etc. The other thing I tell people to do is run Window Washer - but I do not think Webroot has a 64 bit version yet.
Go to http://www.kzconsulting.info/speed-up.htm on my web site and see if there is something that strikes a nerve. Eliminating indexing and things like that may help.
The first thing that happened to me when I set up a 64 bit system came from some of Microsoft's wonderful 64 bit OS updates. Lots of things just went haywire and I had to do a system restore to get it running right again. I turned off automatic updates and started screening everything that came in and had no more problems. Where I am going with this is it could be a 64 bit driver (possibly video) that is conflicting with something else and slowing things down.
Last, my favorite computer, a Lenovo, started getting sluggish when I did simple DOS things like moving and deleting files. Like yours, it would sit there for 30 seconds some time trying to figure out how to do something that should have taken only 1 second. Looking closer, I noticed that, for some reason, IBM had put a Seagate hard drive in my machine - and I have never had any use for Seagates. I replaced it with a SATA Western Digital and the problem cleared.
