TSGL: Dell Dimension - too slow

[Tilman Brandl]

Hi Don,
Hi All,

although I'm not finished with cleaning up, I guess I've solved the main 
problem today.

1. The DVD was broken, couldn't revive it on a different PC

2. At bootup there was a huge delay and afterwards one had to press F1 
to continue. It stated it didn't find HDD 1, 2, and any secondary 
drives. The secondary one was dead, alright. But why primary HDD1 with 
the slave HDD2 empty?

I removed the CVD player, and in Bios set all missing drives from Auto 
to None. That did it. Bootup time plunged from 3 minutes to 45 seconds ! 
The machnine now seems to be much less sluggish.

Bootvis btw didn't reveal anything new, but at least I now know how to 
put it to use ... just in case.

I'll anyway check & clean the box a bit further, install all the updates 
and hope things'll be fine again then ;-)

Thanks to all of you for your help offered so generously.

Tilman

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- 
Von: "Don Penlington" <deepend at tpg.com.au>
An: "Tech Support Guy Mailing List" <list at tsgserver.com>
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 12. Oktober 2006 05:03
Betreff: Re: TSGL: Dell Dimension - too slow


> 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