Here's a painful question, but I feel justified in asking it for two reasons: (1) it's not for me, but for my sister; and (2) I'm doing some Linux missionary work directed at her.
My sister has a relatively new (one year or so) Dell computer running XP. It has always run very slowly. I've made some suggestions which have not worked, such as running Spybot. I think she's defragged. I think she's cleaned up with Norton Clean Sweep.
We could use some more information here to know whether it is really slow or just not meeting expectations. My guess is it probably is slower than it should due to the usual virus/spyware and possibly just having to many things loading into memory. It does sound like the right things have been done for virus and spyware, but maybe some were missed. You also want to stop useless programs from auto-running, especially realplayer, quicktime, and the like. Look for those icons in the taskbar. Also, ctl-alt-del will give you a taskmanager and cpu-meter. Use that to see if rogue programs are using cpu and memory.
I'm going up to her house in Eureka next weekend and she's asked me to try to look into the problem. The only thing I can think of is to see if she's got some memory resident programs that I can close down. Other than that my recommendation is for her to take it into a computer repair shop.
Does anyone have any other ideas of things I can look into? Is there any reason to think that reformatting and reinstalling would help? (I'll take my SuSE 9.2 CD's up there just in case.)
Yes, a reinstall might help, but use a raw WinXP cd, NOT what came with Dell. That one will likely install all kinds of extra crap and you will be no better off than before. Also, don't connect to the internet unless you are on a NAT-firewall until you get windows updates through Service Pack 2.
And, certainly, installing Linux is the best solution. :)
Jonathan _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
