Advent 5421 Slow.

[Tomdanpete]

Hi I have been running a Advent 5421 Laptop for about 2 years and it is now running slow.
Takes about 5 Minutes to load and about the same time to shut down.
Programes also take a time to load.
Running Win Vista,AOL/Internet Explorer/ZoneAlarm/Firefox/Paintshop Pro.
Have tried Defrag/Virus check/Removing unwanted files,no change.
Running on the internet is ok,not sure if there too many programes trying to load,not sure if this is the case how to stop them.
Any help please.
Peter.

[km1971]

Hi Peter

Disk Defrag etc will only effect performance once you have switched on, as most system files will be contiguous.

You should look in System Configuration/Startup. Over the years you will have acquired many programs that will run when you switch on. In Vista it is in Control Panel/Admin Tools. You can disable them all at once or one at a time to see if one in particular is causing the delay.

If you have Windows Update set to automatic, the default seems to be 3am, so when you switch on your PC it goes off to Microsoft straight away. If you log on about the same time each day you can set it to one hour after that, and you probably wont notice when it looks for updates.

If your anti-virus includes something like PC Tune Up in Norton 360 you should run things like registry cleaner, to remove broken links.

If that doesn't work trying posting a question on Yahoo Answers.

Ken

[Tomdanpete]

Thanks Ken will give your suggestion's a try.
Peter.

[km1971]

Hi Peter

Just looked at my own Start Up and disabled half a dozen, All I have kept is the one that runs the sidebar.

PS... I updated the last post (about Norton 360).

Ken

[mezentia]

Hello Peter

First,you've got quite a few programs open, so
(1) why are you running ZoneAlarm? Vista's firewall is probably as good.
(2) Why are you using two browsers (Firefox  & Explorer)?

I'm at work, so this is from memory, but with Vista there is a good tool for looking at the resources that are being used at any time. To get to it, press Ctrl/Alt/Del and the use the option to start the Task Manager. Task Manager's Performance tab will show you your processor and memory usage, but for more information, on the Performance tab, press the Resource Monitor button. This will give you a much more detailed set of information about your PC.

The usual reason I find for slow PCs, is lack of memory, so that switching between programs involves Windows doing a lot of disk accesses to the swapfile. You should be able to see this with the resource monitor.

The other reason for slow startuip/shutdown is the number of processes that are running behind the scenes. You can see a list of these in Task Manager, and Googling them will give you more information about what each one does. Antivirus scans that run at startup tend to cause slow running initially, but other stuff like indexing software and multimedia managers also can have quite an impact. Use task manager to see what proceses are running, and click on the CPU column to see which ones are using most cpu resource.

Hope that helps

David.

[Tomdanpete]

Thanks David will go through these steps and see what happens.
Peter.

[Tomdanpete]

Thanks for all the help given.
I have removed a lot of the programs from the start menu and things are improving,I still seem to be using a lot of memory shows on the graph at about 75% this is without much running.
Peter.

[downside]

I still seem to be using a lot of memory shows on the graph at about 75% this is without much running.

Switch to the Processes tab in Task Manager and look for a process where the digits are high under the CPU and Mem Usage columns.  Then do a Google search on that process name to see what it does.

[mezentia]

Task Manager only gives an overview of what's actually going on, which is why it's better to use the Resource Monitor from the Task Manager's Performance tab. The thing to look for in Resource Monitor is the hard fault rate in the memory section. A hard fault is when a program requests access to a page of memory that windows has swapped out to the page file, so it has to work out where the memory page has been stored, and retrieve it.  Clearly, running memory-intensive programs on a system with too little memory therefore results in slow performance as windows has continually to store and retrieve memory pages from the page file. The resource monitor will list the programs that are getting high hard faults (you can click on the column headings to sort them, as usual) and this will identify which programs are possible causes of poor performance.

The resource monitor will also give more details as to exactly how much resource each program is using, so you should find it easier there to spot the culprits. Favourites are anti-virus scanners, and Norton had a very bad reputation in this respect a while ago, but l understand that the current versions are much better. Multimedia sharing also can cause performance problems: I keep mine turned off unless I actually do need to run it, e.g. doing a slide show to the TV.

There's quite a lot of help in the resource monitor application, so although it's a bit of an effort to go through it all, it's a very useful diagnostic tool.

The other thing to try is simply googling for "performance problems" along with the name of the application you're using to see if anyone else has similar problems.

Hope that helps

David