My PC is very Sluggish - Please help

[flickall]

Hello Guys,
I am using a PIII with 128 MB Ram & 20 GB Hard disk with no graphics card. My PC is very sluggish now a days. when i change from one program to another the its so sluggish
Also when windows xp starts it takes a long time to complete & also load all task bar items.

Please help - i have office,photoshop,firefox & Atnotes i use the bluetooth & GPRS connection to connect. can you help me on this how to increase the speed of the system. i have disable the System restore function too. I have only total 300 MB free space on hard disk, please suggest a method soon.

[bizzard]

You can disable file indexing too to get more space. Freeing disk space and defragmenting your harddisk will also speed up your system. Also, there are many softwares to free up resources from RAM. Memturbo is one of them.
Memturbo website: http://www.memturbo.com/
Memturbo 4 download: http://www.memturbo.com/freedownloads.asp?

Also, instead of using the high space consuming softwares like Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop, you could use OpenOffice and Gimp. They consume much less space and are also available for free(Open Source). You can also switch to other softwares which consume space.

[Zanadoo]

First off I'd buy another 128 MB chip of RAM and install it, shouldn't be too expensive.

Within windows there is a disk cleanup program, open it by going to start, programs, accesories, system tools, then Disk Cleanup. Open it up and let it scan, then check all the boxes and click Ok.

Run a defrag by going back to the system tools folder and click on Disk Defragmenter and click on "Defragment" next to "Analyze" then let that run. After those two steps hopefully you'll notice a significant increase. Also run that memory scan posted above.

[wired076]

I suggest that anything on your hdd that you don't need constantly you burn to disc and you stop all non-essential services from running at startup. Generally speaking a p3 with 128 mb of ram is really only fit for 98 and 2000 and possibly ME. I know as I have tried to run XP on a p3 with the same specs as you have with no additional software installed other than the os and it is so sluggish that it would take 5 min to load up the operating system.

I recommend if you can to buy a new system or at least to upgrade the ram to at least 512 mb as my parents have a p4 with 256 mb of ram which is still sluggish at least the 512 I recommend shouls make up for the lack of your system in other areas but in the long run you should think about a major upgrade to your system or to buy or build a new pc.

[Planetgaming_org]

Always defragment your disk very often. Think of defragmenting as a rejoining of data, which is scattered around in the hard disk. If they are put together it can be much more faster.

Also, the platters have to spin much lesser. In that case, it can be helpful. Also, see to it that more free space is their in the partition windows is installed rather than in the one where only data resides. THis helps in more disk cache and less frequent cleaning up of the cache, which can really boost the system.

I would recommend against the memory freing software. What they do is simply clear the memory's cache of the running programs, and therefore when you reopen the program it again loads everything into the RAM, which can take even more time .

[bizzard]

I would recommend against the memory freing software. What they do is simply clear the memory's cache of the running programs, and therefore when you reopen the program it again loads everything into the RAM, which can take even more time.

What memory freeing software does is not simply clearing the memory's cache of the running programs. Not all programs written are perfect. There may be some problems to reallocate the once used memory space by the program while closing it. This can be checked by calculating the free resources in your system before opening a program and after closing the program. If there is less memory after closing the program than the amount before opening it, there may be some problems with the software in reallocating used memory. What memory freeing software does is that they find such memory bits and reallocate them for the current programs thus speeding up the system.

[zerofool2005]

start>run>msconfig and remove some of the stuff from startup that you dont need
this should speed it up

[realmot]

Your ant-virus can also slowdown your system to a crawl. All the advice above is very good and helpful as well. I'm thinking there are also other "backround" softwares that will slow you down. Use your task manager to see what all is running at any given time.