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Help with AMD2600+ system

T

trueimage

Senior member
This is a firend's pc, an HP setup, with 512mb ram pc2700 ram (but read 448 cuz of 64mb shared with the onboard gf4 mx), athlon xp 2600+, Asus A7N8X-LA.

It's running win xp and runs worse than my p3-500 laptop! It is slow and choppy, and loses about 5 mins of time on the clock every 12-24 hours or so... very weird. It has a lot of HP BS on it, and I'm considering reformatting for him, but I want to see what I can do first.

I have done all the critical windows updates, and updated the nvidia drivers. I own a p4 system, and have never used an nforce chipset. Are there any drivers for this chipset with winxp? what about amd drivers?

Help me out here 😉

PS - I'm going to do a bios update too, or at least check to see if anything important was fixed.
 
oh - and I've never seen this on an athlon system, but if it's that slow, see if the bios has an option for the L2 cache set to 'disable'. I've seen several IBM, Compaq and HP, PCs with Intel chips where the cache had somehow been disabled.
 
That's the problem with pre-built PC's. They're loaded with useless junk, and often they use inferior parts... slow ass hard drives, crappy CAS 3 PC2700 RAM, crappy motherboards, underpowered power supplies... all in effort to keep things cool and quiet and reliable... not fast.

My advice... help him back up his critical data... then help him use the restore disk to restore the computer to it's original state when he bought it. Then leave it alone... if you start messing with things then every time he has a problem he's going to call you. If that's fine with you, go ahead and try to optimize it for him... but if you don't want to be "free tech support," don't do it 🙂
 
I would just format. I have dealt with countless pre-built systems having issues with slow performance. Although there is much that can be done, the resultant performance will still be far less than that of a fresh OS install without all the added manufacturer BS.

If he has upgraded anything, then I would check the PSU. I solved terrible performance issues on someone's computer by replacing their PSU. How would that make a difference one might ask? Well, he installed an aftermarket video card and additional optical drive into his system. It was a P4 system running on a 200W PSU; that's right, 200 measly watts (Go HP). His HDD was clicking and making noises as though it was dying upon trying to read off the disk. It turned out that the lack of power was causing these odd disturbances and the new PSU stopped this, and subsequently improved his performance greatly.

Another issue that is far too common is adware, spyware, malware, and virii. Download Adaware, update it, and scan that system for this nonsense BS software that somehow creeps into all of our lives. I have seen instances of 30-50 additional processes running as a result of excessive adware/spyware. A nice free virus scanner which I have been using with much success in the past year or so is Avast. It's free for personal use. You just have to register once every year or two.
 
losing time on the clock makes it sound like the battery is kaput.

have a look at task manager, might be something simple like an app/service eating cpu.
 
Thanks for the tips. He has tons of space so I might just partition, move it over to the "2nd" drive and format, install xp fresh, no hp crap.

I haven't looked under the hood yet, but he hasn't done any upgrades yet.

I have scanned with ad-aware and norton, both up to date, and things seem clean.

I have disabled as much startup stuff as I can.

I have updated nforce2 and nvidia graphics drivers.

I think the shared video ram is killing it (he wants to upgrade anyway)... but a clean install would certainly help a ton.

The PC isnt that old, but he has installed a ton of apps and games... so I think it just needs a fresh install.

I was just wondering about chipset/cpu specific updates.

PS - this has an HP bios on it i think, not the asus one, so I'm going to open it up, find the board revision and update that too to give me more options, i think a lot of them are disabled by HP
 
Originally posted by: trueimage
PS - this has an HP bios on it i think, not the asus one, so I'm going to open it up, find the board revision and update that too to give me more options, i think a lot of them are disabled by HP
Click to expand...

Your pretty brave to update the board to a different BIOS if your going to be using the ASUS one and not the HP one. Hope it goes well..
 
Originally posted by: trueimage
Thanks for the tips. He has tons of space so I might just partition, move it over to the "2nd" drive and format, install xp fresh, no hp crap.

I haven't looked under the hood yet, but he hasn't done any upgrades yet.

I have scanned with ad-aware and norton, both up to date, and things seem clean.

I have disabled as much startup stuff as I can.

I have updated nforce2 and nvidia graphics drivers.

I think the shared video ram is killing it (he wants to upgrade anyway)... but a clean install would certainly help a ton.

The PC isnt that old, but he has installed a ton of apps and games... so I think it just needs a fresh install.

I was just wondering about chipset/cpu specific updates.

PS - this has an HP bios on it i think, not the asus one, so I'm going to open it up, find the board revision and update that too to give me more options, i think a lot of them are disabled by HP
Click to expand...

As I have said, if he plans on upgrading, take a look at the PSU. If the wattage and the specific rails look like they are suitable for an upgrade, then do so. However, I sincerely doubt it. Pre-built PCs have PSUs that just barely allow operation a lot of the time.

I'm not sure I would flash the BIOS with something other than an HP BIOS. I have never tried such a thing on a pre-built system. You should make him aware of the possible catastrophe that might lead to.
 
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