I've been trying to solve this for over 2 years but I couldn't find out what's the problem with this computer. We bought it in the beginning of 2007 and it always had a trouble: the loading times for everything are a pain in the ass. We're talking about about 5-10 minutes to load XP with only NOD32 and MSN loading at startup, and up to 5 minutes to load Firefox! Anyway, after a program is loaded it works perfectly and at a great speed... I've checked the memory and CPU usage and the system isn't overloaded (in fact the CPU usage rarely goes over 30%, even on intensive tasks) and the system is completely free of virus and spyware. The specs of this computer should be more than enough for basic work-related stuff (office 2003, firefox, thunderbird and programs like that), we're talking about a Pentium Dual-Core E2140 at 1.6GHz with 1.5GB of DDR2 RAM and a SATA 120GB hard drive. The big trouble is that during the past months it's becoming slower and slower... Any advices on anything I should check? Thanks in advance
Could be a failing HardDrive. Is it a Seagate ? If so, check if it's a 7200.11, that model had some huge problems.
It's a Seagate, but it is a 7200.9. I'll check the disk data transfer speed with some benchmarking tool anyway, maybe the hard disk is the problem.
I had similar problems due to harddisks. It also does this really weird thing when it boots up, where it just stays there on the desktop and doesn't load anything on the traybar,but in a few moments it just loads anything instantly doesn't it? I suggest you try HD Tune, it's great for benchmarking and checking for problems.
Download seatools and run that or ultimatebootCD iso. Burn it onto a CD and boot up off of it. Run Seatools (UBCD has it) and check the hard drive. If it fails, then that's why it's slow. However, if the hard drive passes the diagnostics (long & short test), then replace the SATA cable. I've seen slow PCs become faster after replacing just the SATA cable.
Yeah, it does that, however HD Tune didn't find any troubles with the disk. I have some spare cables here at home, I'll try replacing the SATA cable and see what happens. Whatever the problem is, it will have to wait 2 weeks since I only go there on Saturdays and next Saturday it'll be closed for workers day. I'll let you know what happened when I can change the cables.
Have you tried defragging malware bytes ccleaner reformatting etc? my laptop got to the point where i could uninstall everything but it would still run like shit until it got reformatted
