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LadyDay
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Posted: Thursday March 11th, 2004 21:22 |
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i was just wondering is there anything that i can do to improve my pc performance. as when it starts up it seems rather slow in booting up. it takes a few minutes to do so. i have only used up just over a third of hard drive space.
i am looking into putting in a bigger hard drive but as my pc is not even a yr old i dont want to do that just yet
a guy at work says that i should try de -fragmenting the disc space.
all good advise welcome
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Ijexa
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Posted: Thursday March 11th, 2004 22:14 |
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@LadyDay
If you can... let us know what OS you are using, and the actual boot process... i.e. time of PC start; memory check... hardware recognition... time of Windows boot to login screen.
Basic things you could do...
1. Defrag PC.
2. Check BIOS for Fast Boot options.
3. Validate boot sequence i.e. is virus checking initiated at boot.
4. Validate Windows Boot using F8 key.
Ijexa
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LadyDay
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Posted: Friday March 12th, 2004 17:59 |
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Thanks for the advise
i am using xp home
not too sure of boot process but i think basically the first thing i usually see is "go back" then i see the wondows xp sign welcome the my desktop. various things seem to be loading and in about three - five minutes its ready to use. today it took just over three minutes to boot
1. Defrag PC.=i did an analysis today and it said that i did not need to defrag the hardrive yet. so i di not de-frag. the report said that 76% of hd space is free
2. Check BIOS for Fast Boot options. = i do not know what this means please advise
3. Validate boot sequence i.e. is virus checking initiated at boot. = i think virus checking is done at start up. i use norton anti-virus professional and zone alarms
4. Validate Windows Boot using F8 key. = dont mean to sond completely clueless but i think you will need to further explain this for me
as for log in screen i do not really get one as i have only got one user account on my pc.
i hope this additional info helps
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Ijexa
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Posted: Saturday March 13th, 2004 02:27 |
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@LadyDay
***Scratches head***
Okay...
2. Without knowing what BIOS type and version you're using... it pretty difficult to actually give key instructions on where to look...
However... without going into detail... if it does turn out that your problem is BIOS based... then it might be worthwhile resetting the BIOS to default values...
You should be able to access the BIOS by normally pressing the DELETE <DEL> key when your machine is doing the memory check and before it starts loading Windows...
But... please check carefully before you make any changes... nothing overtly detrimental will happen... but it is best to take some time and familiarise yourself with the BIOS environment before making any changes...
3. Regardless of whether virus checking is done at system boot... or windows start... it is not necessary for it to be done every single time that you restart your PC... basically after installing the virus protection software... and have done an initial check of your hard disk... the only real requirement after that is to virus check new software and files as you download/install...
The only other thing is to have your virus software running in the background to check those programs loaded in memory... i.e. there should be an program icon in the system tray... (Bottom left hand corner of screen)
4. After your PC has done the initial memory check and recognised hardware... before windows startup is initiated... hold down the F8 key... this should give you the option to manual confirm what commands are actually run to start Windows...
It's worthwhile just to actually look at what your system initiates...
If that's too much information... what I can try and do... if one of the resident Windows gurus are not able to help you... is put together a very small checklist for you to run through...
Let us know how it goes...
Ijexa
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LadyDay
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Posted: Saturday March 13th, 2004 22:46 |
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a checklist sounds best. when it comes to the tech jargon especially if i have not come across it. its giberish.
you see with point 4. should that be done after or before go back appears. as my pc turns on go back screen appears giving me the option to press space bar to fix faults then within a few seconds windows screen appears.. should i press f8 as soon as i switch on the pc
i am trying to learn. i may need to invest in a windows xp for idiots guide or pc know how book- we have got to start somewhere.
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Nick
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Posted: Sunday March 14th, 2004 07:59 |
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Just out of intrest, how much RAM does your computer have? If you right click on My Computer and then click propities it will bring up a window. Down in the bottom of this window it should say x amount of RAM somewhere.
Any less than about 256MB and this is proberly a major cause of the slow down.
EDIT: Oh and one more thing, try holding down left shift from when you log in(if it automatcially logs in, do it when it says "loading your personal settings") till when it has finished loading everything. What this does is bypass loading all things at startup. So if it improves it a lot, then you can look into removing some items that startup.
Last edited on Sunday March 14th, 2004 08:03 by Nick
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Saint
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Posted: Sunday March 14th, 2004 20:31 |
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@ Ijexa
Come on, she doesn't know about all this bios stuff you talking about(not trying to say she doesn't know anything about her computers), it is not that easy for someone who just do normal work on the pc to know about all this computer jargons you have mentioned. You need to state it step by step, I remember in 2000 when i had my first PC, all those bios stuff was unknown to me. it's actually good you tried to help, but you were talking as if your talking to another Guru.
@ Nick wrote :Any less than about 256MB and this is proberly a major cause of the slow down
I have 196MB and my PC works absolutely fine and it is not slow.
Anyway I do agree that if there are a lot of programs that are running at startup, it may slows down the pc. So Ladyday, if you have programs like kazza etc which runs automatically after startup, you need to make sure they dont run at startup, because they slow down the pc.
Also, Norton Antivirus does slow down PC a lot, it is always checking some stuff after startup, it may be one of the causes. But like Nick said, if you have a small ram just , it will probably slow down your pc.
Ladyday, you said are trying to learn and you may need to invest in a windows xp for idiots guide or pc know how book. My advice is that you may not need to buy a book, you should check google, type in whatever problem you may have there, and you will see that someone has had the problem before. You can go to forums on google, you will learn a lot that way.
Most of the guys learn from such forums and the experience of doing it themselves. I think the Computer Gurus are so nice, after finding a solution to a problem, they put it on the net in case anyone needs help or find himself/herself in similar situation
However, if you have the money to spend, why not, then you may go and buy a book, but trust me, you won't find the solution to all the problems your pc will give in the book.
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Nick
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Posted: Sunday March 14th, 2004 20:42 |
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Ok fair point. I was thinking along the lines that most manufactureded pc's tend to double the amount of ram ie 64->128->256->512mb every generation. So if she had less than 256, she would most likely have 128mb. I have used XP on a machine with 128mb of ram and while a fresh install is fine, once a few things have been installed it really starts to crawl.
There are a few other things that could be causing this however. But without knowing more about the problem it is very hard to diagnose the problem. When is it slow?
Starting up, up to the point where you login?
Loading up your desktop?
Opening programs?
Does the light(Hard Disk) of the front of your pc flash a lot while it is being slow?
Try that holding shift thing I talked about, if it works then it should be fairly simple to find out whats going wrong.
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LadyDay
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Posted: Monday March 15th, 2004 17:27 |
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Hi thanks for all the advise
here is some more info ram 256 hd 40gb amd athlon 1.73 ghz speed
i noticed that msn messenger was starting at the beginning so i have stopped that by going in and unticking things. i do have kazaa lite but that does not run at start up.
is it worth me taking a look in misconfig.........
oh yeah the last thing to load is zone alarms. should i set this run just before i connect to the internet or what? usually i can start using things prior to it finish loading.
once my computer is on and the icons appear it is not ready to use it takes a minute or two.
in the start bar i can see yahoo msg zone alarms msn msg norton printer spyware gaurd go back ms money volume key board and sound max. hope this helps.
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Nick
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Posted: Monday March 15th, 2004 17:59 |
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um....right ok that gives me a bit more to go on. You do have a fair ammount of programs loading at the start, but not enough to make it take a couple of minutes to load.
When you say a minute after the icons have loaded, do you mean desktop icons or the icons in the system tray near the clock?
Try holding shift down, if this makes it load up fast, then it is definitly to do with the amount of programs loading at start.
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LadyDay
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Posted: Monday March 15th, 2004 20:22 |
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| right..........i held down shift key and it did load up alot quicker .
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Nick
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Posted: Monday March 15th, 2004 20:36 |
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Ok. I think holding down shift only effects the programs present in the startup folder of the start menu. If you try hunting through this and see if you can remove any programs, this will hopefully make it load to a similar speed to when you held down shift.
Another thing you could try. Is to right click on the taskbar and select task manager, then select the performance tab. Check to see what the memory usage is. I know Saint said that it should be fine with the amount of ram you have, but its best just to check everything to be sure. If your mem usage is over or near 256MB then thats proberly not helping either.
I have win 2000 and not quite as many programs as you open. And I am running at about 220MB usage at the moment, so you maybe you mught be pushing it, but check and find out.
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MRBUFFNESS
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Posted: Wednesday March 17th, 2004 07:49 |
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LadyDay wrote: i was just wondering is there anything that i can do to improve my pc performance. as when it starts up it seems rather slow in booting up. it takes a few minutes to do so. i have only used up just over a third of hard drive space.
i am looking into putting in a bigger hard drive but as my pc is not even a yr old i dont want to do that just yet
a guy at work says that i should try de -fragmenting the disc space.
all good advise welcome
Defrag your pc best thing is to do it over night as it takes ages, also try to delete unwanted files to save space as your hardrive uses vitrual memory at some point if the memory ram gets to low also sort out your page share filling in advaced settings ahhhh dont touch that get a technican in for that bit.
Last edited on Thursday March 18th, 2004 00:59 by MRBUFFNESS
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Posted: Saturday April 17th, 2004 11:54 |
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If your PC is slowing down, it seems that you have build up temperary files on your computer.
If it was a BIOS problem, the PC would be slow all the time.
To clear the build up of temp files:
1 - click start
2 - programs
3 - accessories
4 - system tools
5 - select disk cleanup
6 - check boxes that you want to clear !
This should clear the temp files that is slowing your PC at boot time.
Let us know if this tip works.
@eboney
Last edited on Saturday April 17th, 2004 12:08 by eboney
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Fredblack
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Posted: Saturday April 17th, 2004 13:09 |
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@All. Had the worse two weeks of my PC career. Had one day left before my Norton Internet Security ran out so I went to buy an update and downloaded as normal. The PC did not like it at all and would not accept the download. After two weeks I decided to take it back. By this time and don't ask me how as I tried everything I could think of but it would appear to have completely thrown my machine out of sync. My browser started to play up, I could not open links, especially PM's and even now I can only open links when the PC allows.
Been completely unable to contact the makers of the product on their convuluted and it would appear designed to frustrate web services, I went back to the shop and because by this time I had taken my original Norton 2003 package off they told me to try the full 2004 package. Same drama. It downloaded successfully but in a second I realised something was off as the Norton icon and menu was not visible, despite my hard disk saying the software was on the system. When I clicked the Norton icon you can see it struggling to fire up and at times the Norton page would appear and then disappear. Then I tried to delete/remove the Norton Package and it would not allow me.
The whole thing has become a nightmare. as the people in PC World cleary don't know what they are talking about. Symantec the manufactures hide behind this electronic wall so you cannot speak to anyone. My PC now has no protection and has distablised my system some how. My PC is less than a year and half old and has never given me a days problem, until I innocently tried to update my securit protection. Initially I tried to buy the download on line and when I saw how confusing this was, I cancelled. Guess what they took the money off my credit card anyway.
A couple of my pals who can fix anything are completely bamzooled and I am going absolutely ape as it seems as if the minium requirments as stated in the mannual and the reality are not one and the same. I have even downloaded higer service packs with no joy and honestly am at a complete loss. I simply expected to insert a disc and let it does its work, and did not bargain for this.
Any help would be appreciated because I am really loss on this one and want to kick somebody really hard as my work has been severely disrupted. Apart from bringing the package back I am not sure what to do and even then the damn thing will not allow me to delete or remove it.
Fred
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Nick
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Posted: Saturday April 17th, 2004 16:23 |
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Hmmm. Yes I have encountered a few problems with Norton in the past. The problem I was seeing with a friends pc, was that while he was trying to upgrade from 2002 to 2004 he was getting an error during installation and wouldn't install. Also this was causing outlook express to hang for a minute or 2 during installation.
If I can remember the fix was to reload the imagehlp.dll. However this was on a 98/ME machine. What OS do you have? if you have 98/Me I can guide you through this.
If you are running 2000/XP try running "sfc /scannow" this will check that no windows files have been damaged and replace them if they have. You will need the windows CD available, unless the manufacturer has backed it up to the disk.
If you can give any other details into what else is running badly, or any error messages (including error numbers) that NAV spat out, it would really help.
Last option to try and repair windows if it is still running badly is to perform a full repair, which is really a last resort option.
Else if you are looking for a free virus checker that works. Try this site:-
http://www.grisoft.com
It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of norton or the other big players, but it does the job.
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Fredblack
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Posted: Saturday April 17th, 2004 16:28 |
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@Nick god bless you mate. I am going to look at what you have said and will get back.
Fred
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LadyDay
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Posted: Thursday April 22nd, 2004 07:35 |
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guys can you help me on this one
at work i can always see the emoticons in motion etc.......at home i used to but now they are static still. a friend said that it could be script blocking. i have zone alarms pro and norton anti virus. is this effecting it.
what things can i check or untick etc so that i can see some emotions when i am on the web
Thanks in advance
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Nick
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Posted: Thursday April 22nd, 2004 08:18 |
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Try going in IE into :-
Tools menu->Internet options->Advanced->multimedia
and Check that play animations is ticked.
Other thing you can try is in Zone Alarm check Turn off Ad-Blocking. If this makes the icons animate then, there is probably an option somewhere called "animate". Turning this off will most likely allow you to use the Ad Blocker and have animated icons.
Hope that helped
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LadyDay
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Posted: Thursday April 22nd, 2004 10:13 |
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| thanks for the advise i will try it when i get home later
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LadyDay
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Posted: Thursday April 22nd, 2004 20:48 |
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hey nick
i did what you said but the emoticons dont move. someone on this forum has a man in a box walking round it i can see those type of animations inmotion though. so i guess i am halfway there.
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Posted: Thursday April 22nd, 2004 21:38 |
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Can you post a link to the page with the working animation, so I can see what it is that is working.
Which method did you try?
Heres a more detailed zone alarm one:-
Check Zone Alarm's PRIVACY button (5th label down LHS):-
If Ad blocking is OFF then animations should run.
If Ad blocking is ON click Custom button and UNTICK Animation.
The only other thing I can think of, is to shut down all other applications completely, like zone alarm, norton....etc
If this fixes it, then load 1 at a time and see when it stops working. Then you can play around with the options until its sorted
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LadyDay
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Posted: Friday April 23rd, 2004 22:55 |
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Hi Nick
the information you gave me about zone alarms and going into custom etc is what i actually did.
below are two links two the images i can see plus a link to a page that actually contains one of those images
i can see the following images moving
happiness's flag
the mad rhetorics man walking in a box
here is a link to oneof the pages http://www.blackchat.co.uk/theblackforum/forum31/2539.html
thanks again
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Nick
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Posted: Saturday April 24th, 2004 17:45 |
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Umm... I think you missed one of the links.
Another thing you can try is to clear your temp internet files. By going into tools->options->delete files.
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The Dean
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Posted: Saturday April 24th, 2004 18:38 |
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| Dear or to whom it may concern when your pc boots up slow u can try installing a new hard drive but less look in depth by installing a faster processor.
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