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My new computer is too slow, why?

 
Ranch Hand
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Hello everyone!
I bought a computer (Time, UK) with the following specs
1. Athlon XP 2200+ processor
2. 512 Megs of Ram
3. Geforce card
4. Windows XP Home
Now, the computer worked brilliantly for the first 3 months or so. We leave it one all the time because it provides internet access to other computers in the house.
After about 3 months it's performance deteriorate drastically. Finally it took me about 2 minutes to start Microsoft Outlook. We would wait for about 5 minuts for a simple print job to start.
I thought the problem was Windows XP so I downgraded to Windows 2000 pro. The machnie worked real good for the first 3 weeks or and now we are in the same situation again. I looked at this thread here https://coderanch.com/t/131251/gc/computer-slow but I could not find any help.
Should I send the computer back because it obviously has a problem somewhere?
 
Rancher
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Yep, windows often needs to be installed every 3-6 months.
I'm running win2k on my laptop and got a noticable improvement by:
* run scandisk on the harddrive
* Defrag the harddrive
* Defrag the system files (swap etc)
* clean the registry with a registry cleaner
* defrag the registry
I'll run that process again in about 3 months if it starts laggin again.
 
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Ernest,
congrats! great boost to your life!

Originally posted by ernest fakudze ...
We leave it one all the time because it provides internet access to other computers in the house.


Permanent connection to Internet through WindowsXP...


Sounds like an open door to the world...
Do you have firewall, antivirus monitors installed?

I propose to change your attitude to:
"We switch it off ASAP because it has internet access .... "

Defragmentation , even archiving all your posts/messages separately from MS Outlook very nice. I had similar news from one my friend: he had got the viruses through Email. I do not believe that PC may have deteriorate its performance drastically only due to fragmentation.
Let me give INNOCENT examples-exceptions to this:
if you save-as anything from www.kp.ru, that article will be opening for a minute... until you change Cyrillic letters to Latin letters in the name of the saved html-file. "Culture friction" problem...

 
With a little knowledge, a cast iron skillet is non-stick and lasts a lifetime.
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