uncajo

Honorable
May 12, 2012
10
0
10,510
I recently got a dell Xp to help a buddy, and it was sooo slow, I found 7,800 errors broken this unknown that registry errors, etc. most in temp. I managed to clear most up, but it`s still the slowet PC I`ve seen. I used AVG, and recomend it for all. it covers so many bases. dell has built in so many built in tests, and I did them for many hours. I can`t do two jobs at the same time with it.
Sooo my question is, is that the best it will do? it has 2,56 gig cpu , 256 mbts of memory, and is about 6, or 7 yrs old. the drive is very quiet. One thing (`ve noticed is the HDD seems to constantly be running seeking, or searching.
SOOO what can you tell me???
Joe
 
Solution
Well I can tell you the main reason its so slow and that your hard disk is always caching data is because you don't have enough ram. you desperately need more ram. I just refurbished an xp laptop. here is what I did:

Dell Inspiron 700m 2Ghz Pentium M processor with 1.28 Gigs of ram & 80 Gig Hard Disk (Circa 2004-2005)

1) upgraded motherboard bios from A03 to A07
2) factory reset Windows XP from the system restore partition
3) removed all the crap software dell bundled with the system
4) upgraded Windows to Service Pack 3 and updated with all system patches
5) defragmented hard disk
6) created backup image of entire hard disk (it was only 15 gigs!) and moved to external hard disk.
7) deleted system restore partition to free up...
Well I can tell you the main reason its so slow and that your hard disk is always caching data is because you don't have enough ram. you desperately need more ram. I just refurbished an xp laptop. here is what I did:

Dell Inspiron 700m 2Ghz Pentium M processor with 1.28 Gigs of ram & 80 Gig Hard Disk (Circa 2004-2005)

1) upgraded motherboard bios from A03 to A07
2) factory reset Windows XP from the system restore partition
3) removed all the crap software dell bundled with the system
4) upgraded Windows to Service Pack 3 and updated with all system patches
5) defragmented hard disk
6) created backup image of entire hard disk (it was only 15 gigs!) and moved to external hard disk.
7) deleted system restore partition to free up precious storage space on tiny 80 gig drive
8) shrunk windows NTFS partition to half the hard disk to make room for Linux.
9) Downloaded Ubuntu 12.04 32bit and created USB Boot disk for installation
10) discovered laptop refused to boot with a usb thumb drive regardless of bios settings.
11) burned Ubuntu image onto CD and when attempting to boot received the error message "System Halted - your cpu does not support PAE" After doing some research I discovered that the latest ubuntu has PAE support enabled in the kernel which allows 32bit operating systems to use more than 4 gigs of ram. This is not supposed to interfere with cpus that do not support PAE but there is a bug preventing the installation cd from booting.
12) downloaded Xubuntu instead and burned to cd as Xubuntu uses a kernel without PAE support and installed successfully!

Now its all setup to dual boot between Windows XP and Ubuntu.

 
Solution