TSGL: Dell Dimension - too slow

[Don Penlington]

Tilman wrote:

>The bootup process (and possible problems there) may
>not have any relation with whatever reasons there are for an overall
>slowness.>>


But they often do. It's the first place I'd be looking for possible clues. 
A bad driver, for instance, can play havoc with performance, if it's 
neither fully open nor fully closed (does that make any sense?). Just 
sitting there in limbo, forever sucking up power trying to get properly 
operative.

<<her kids have  got games on CD which - on second thought - might be worth 
scrutinizing
more closely.>>

That'd be my 2nd choice.  I haven't seen a computer yet (admittedly I 
haven't seen many) with kids games
where performance has been AOK.  I think there are many games poorly 
written, or just not suitable for XP, where resources do not get properly 
released, even on reboot. Seems impossible in theory, but it happens.

I su[pposxe you've had a careful look thru Task Manager at both Processes 
and Applications.  Remembering that XP retains settings on reboot, look for 
any running processes that are unusual.  A very common problem with games 
is an aborted or failed install continuing to run the installation process 
Msie.exe.  Often this fails to release, and continues to suck up resources 
which don't otherwise seem to show except that everything slows down to a 
crawl or gets stuck.  Often you'll find several instances of the same .exe 
running as the kids try several times to install something before giving up.

Msie, contrary to popular belief, is not a Microsoft process, but a 3rd 
party installer available to programmers. It is prone to difficulties when 
it goes wrong, and this can sometimes be seen with many games 
installations.  I'd therefore rate your "kids games" as prime suspects. 
Look especially for any failed installations which may have left registry 
remnants behind, including startups. You might be in for some very tedious 
manual registry cleaning, unless perchance ERUNT happens to be on the 
computer and contains some early registry backups.

In the end, you might well find it easier to reformat and reinstall XP.

Don Penlington






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