Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of msis2002
msis2002

asked on

Slow Dell Inspiron 9400 Laptop

I have a Dell Inspiron 9400.  It has XP SP3 Pro Version 2002. Intel T2400 Processor, 1.83GHZ.  .99GB of Ram. I use McAfee AV protection.  My laptop has become progressively slower over the years.  It takes much longer to boot up and then when the screen comes up the light that signifies hard-drive usage stays on for a long time, sometimes hours, signifying something accessing the HDD. Using MSCONFIG I have eliminated several unneeded start-up programs. This helped a little. What else can I do to speed this system up.

Thanks
Avatar of Kenneth Brown
Kenneth Brown
Flag of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland image

your last ditch solution is to backup data and then delete everything (reformat etc) and reinstall xp, reinstall apps and copy data back on. If your laptop is still slow after that then thats how it is, unfortunately.
I have noticed this trend in older XP machines recently, of them becoming very slow on boot.
You can try to isolate a culprit, or just do a general major tidy-up, the latter of which should give you some headroom anyway. latter soln 'tips' given below:
I got goodish results by ( again backup / clone first jic)
1) deleting as much superfluous data, old downloads etc as poss, ie free up as much disk space as poss; esp from system drive. if poss move stuff to another drive.
2) from an admin logon, delete any unused users or even any used-users as long as you can re-create them later and restore vital data
3) run ccleaner
4) delete all system restore points.
5) once youre fully finished freeing up space, do a defrag.

If you want to try to isolate the problem: try enablng boot-logging in an F7 reboot and then examine the log for problems. Unfortunately it doesnt time stamp entries so you might have to watch the display in real-time to see where it apparently hangs (if it does so).

Below may be of some help if you haven’t already tried it, but neither have I so cant actually vouch for it: use at your own risk:
See question “No timestamp in XPs bootlog file”
<answer 20840141> http://www.mvps.org/sramesh2k/utils/BootVis.exe 
Doing a new re-install will help as suggested Knelbrown2.

Since system is always accessing the hard disk it could be that the hard disk itself is an issue.
Down load free UBCD and diagnose your drive.

Hard drives are not very costly these days. I would also consider changing the hard drive if its more
than 4/5 years old.



ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of nobus
nobus
Flag of Belgium image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Asidu/Nobus' comments re check the HD and try install on a 'new' hd are good. The latter saves the trouble of making sure youv'e backed everything up properly before the new install.
Avatar of msis2002
msis2002

ASKER

Did defrag and got rid of mcafee.  Thx
tx for feedback