S-L-O-W HP Pavilion 1600

It's become slow in everything; from programs booting up, to the cursor delaying in appearing. I'm removing "Fix-It Utilities", since I thinik it has too many programs running in the background. I'll let you know what happens when I get rid of it.

Background apps can definitely contribute to slowness, particular antivirus/anti-Malware apps that do real-time scanning of every file you touch. Turning off real-time scanning at least as a test would be beneficial. If you decide to leave it off, at least schedule daily scheduled scans.

Another thing, if you've had the computer for awhile and don't defrag your hard drive at least a couple of times a year, it could be a real mess. In that case running defrag 2-3 times back to back could result in a dramatic speed increase.

Also check the startup stuff, malware and use task manager or Perfmon to log resources and see what is being over utilized.


I hope this helps !

you can diagnose by disabling startup programs with msconfig from the run box.
hit disable all and test

If you have over all slowness on a newer PC like that, I would have to say you probably have a load of spyware on there.

Try Windows Defender or Ad-Aware at http://www.lavasoftusa.com/

Definately follow the advice above, and remove un-needed start-up programs by removing them from the startup folder on your start menu, and by running the msconfig program from the RUN command.  When you use msconfig, be careful not to remove any needed processes.  Research each process name on Google if needed before telling the program not to run it.

Regards,

Rob

Is Norton installed on this computer?

You can tune up your computer to work optimally. I would highly recommend the service www.support.com offers for any computer problems. You can try calling them for your problem.

::Pranav::

Do you have a ton of icons in your system tray?  If you do you most likely have several applications that are loading and just occupying memory which will slow your computer down. You might want to disable these apps if you don't use them enough for it to have easy access icons living in your tray. If you have applications that have automatic updates enabled, some of these apps have little applications that run all the time to constantly check for updates, try disabling the automatic check.. some of these apps will check for a new version everytime you launch the application anyways.

Like others have said, you might also want to scan your computer for malware/spyware that may have gotten installed.  

What browser do you use? IE or Firefox?  If you mainly use Firefox, do you have many extensions installed? Extensions chew up a lot of resources in Firefox, even if you aren't always using them.  You might try disabling/removing the ones you don't use.

Do you have a desktop search engine installed, like google desktop or microsoft live desktop search?  I have found that with older systems, that desktop search engines are continuously indexing your hard drive, which can drastically cause system slowdown.

Also, you might just try defragmenting you hard disk.  The older you system gets, and assuming you may have never done this, the harder it is to the computer to read files, causing slowdown (imagine a file as a bag of marbles, and the floor as your disc drive, if you were to empty the bag on the floor, the marb les would come to rest scattered everywhere, in random places. now when you want to put the marbles back in the bag you have to run around the room to pick them up... which takes a lot of time, similarly to when you want to open a file that has been saved on an disc that hasn't been defragmented in quite some time).

Some software conflicts with Symantec/Norton software causing extreme slowness.

If you have the 60 day trial version of Norton Internet Security 2006, and do not want to purchase an upgrade version, here is a link to the steps to uninstall it.

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/nip.nsf/docid/2004092711224136

Rdwaryer28, you've got plenty of advice for solving your problem.  How about some feedback?

I think the comment I made covers just about everything if you take a look at the link in it, although I wouldn't object to sharing with the others...

I believe LeeTutor has given good advice in all the years I have participated in Experts Exchange, and I recommend he receive credit for his solution. My suggestion to check for a Norton antivirus problem was not responded to by the questioner, so I do not know if it deserves credit.

It's hard to really say who shoud get credit because the author never replied.  Technically you could say none of us helped because we didn't have enough information to give anything definitive, just general suggestions. It isn't really a "solution" to say go to such and such website and read over dozens of different articles/links and more or less figure it out for yourself (I'm not saying though that the advice wasn't useful given the vague nature of the question - only that it isn't a solution)

That said, I have no problem with LeeTutor getting the points. Someone should get them, might as well be someone who has put in a lot of time on this site helping people :-)

The problem they had was probably the mode the hard drive was running in. These computers are notorious for stepping the mode down. Windows XP will automatically "step down" the mode that an IDE hard drive runs at if it detects errors. It will do it on CD Rom drives aespecially. Go into device manager right click on the IDE channel and go into properties. Click on the advanced tab and that will show you what mode it's running at.