VERY SLOW XP Machine....

My parents are in peril. Their Computer a, 3 year old XP machine is VERY VERY slow. Programs pop up pretty quickly but boot up time is 5-6 minutes. The internet download speeds are SLOW what takes that computer a half hour takes my laptop running shitty glitched out vista just seconds.

Webpages load fast but everything else on that shitbox runs slow. Programs do load right away though.

What could be wrong with it?

Not sure about specs, I know it has a gig of ram and a 3ghz P4 Hard drive is only a few months old.

I had trouble installing spybot on it. so something is def wrong with it but it's beyond my powers to know what.

When a Laptop running Vista is out performing anything running XP Pro something is horribly wrong with the XP pro system no? (granted it's a 32 bit system and I have 3x the ram and a 64bit processor)

 

If you had trouble installing spybot on it, then sounds like there is definatly spyware on it. There's a lot of spyware out there that will disable, or prevent that program from being installed.

 

Would that explain the shitty bandwidth too? So...install these things in safe mode maybe?

My halfwit brother deleted all the anti everything software and installed some shit program his school uses... I think that's when it really started down the shitter.

 

Wrong area. This should be in the "Computer Support" forum.

But anyway, the problem is simple...

You have spyware that has installed itself on the network stack. Everything you do gets routed to their server, which in turn, gets automagically forwarded to the website you actually requested. The slow speeds your getting is the result of their servers not being very good (ie. crap).

Answer?

Format the PC and start clean. Theres very little value in trying to clean it up because now days intruders install so many redundant backdoors, holes, processes, etc that once they get in, they usually stay.

 

I was unaware of the computer support forum, Figures Its at the VERY bottom....

anyways I'm just going to have our people look at it. It might be hardware it's been taking 5+ minutes to load for months

 

Personally I would make back ups of all personal files,

Do a Clean install of Windows after a Reformat.

And Add in a RAM upgrade while you are at it.

I fixed an elderly couple's computer with similar problems earlier this year, Upgraded the RAM, did a clean install and everything worked perfect afterwards.


Then the Husband died a few weeks later.. I was Sad :<

 

Losing customers can be a drag, I know:lol:

 

Guess you should have remembered to reattach the earthing wire... damn! :drool:

 

do a virus scan?
thats what i would do....

 

Yeah...I have no idea where the XP disc is either...

Anyway thanks, I hope it's not as bad as you guys are stating as, well I really don't like reinstalling things on that computer.

Actually I just plain hate that computer, It's always been slow.

 

Faulty hardware seldomly causes slowdowns to your OS, it usually works or it doesn't your best guess is always a reinstall as spending time trying to fix things is just a big waste of time.
Making some backups on an external hdd is easy and so is a reinstall usually depending on hardware support but the only thing you really need sorted is ethernet/wireless so make sure you have the drivers before reinstalling.

 

My PC is exactly the same. I ran a spyware program and it detected 12300 files LOL
Bad thing is it was just some kind of odd shareware that scans, but won't clean up unless you buy the full version, so I got SpyBot. It installs, but as soon as I want to start it, everything freezes and all I can do is a cold reboot.

I hate computers so much ._:

 

Hijack this revealed nothing odd.

The only slow times I get on this computer is transferring to my external and I blame USB for that.

 

Have you tried running Nod32.

Also did you tried to disable some of the startup apps.

 

Reformat and reinstall. XP suffers from crud over time. This is the best way to fix it.

 

Virus/spyware scan.
Remove unnecessary startup items. (run -> msconfig -> startup, then uncheck items)
Defragment hard drive.
Upgrade RAM.

Excellence.

 

Yeah I did that, I checked with hijack this for anything iffy in the background nothing.

I'm taking it to be serviced tomorrow.

 

Just reformat. Seriously.

 

Just reformat. Its more than likely what they will do and charge you 70 quid for it. They did that to my auntie and the twats didnt reformat it. If you cant find an XP disk just torrent it. should take about an hour to download

 

I was right the mother board died, it was hardware