Slow Computer

[jepmep]

My parents have a HP (Walmart special) computer. They have had it for about 2 years and are starting to have problems. They are on a fixed income and use the computer for email and web surfing.

The problem started a few weeks ago. When booting the computer, it is now very slow. How do I diagnose the problem? Is there s/w available to determine where the problem is?

The system has a 30 G HD and 256 meg ram. I'm not sure what processor it has.

Anyone have any experience with this? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

ps. I am new to this site but it looks like there are a lot of helpful people here.

Thanks

 

[compfreak999]

well whats slow, the internet or the computer as a whole? try cleaning out the dust in the comptuer as some issues are cause of high dust buildup, but you might just have to reinstall the entire computer, i know someone that had that problem and a reinstallation fixed everythign. good luck!

 

[TD77077]

People who mostly websurf and e-mail often end up with their temp. internet files and cookie folders getting huge. This can slow things down a lot.

Open Internet Explorer and go to tools/internet options and click on "delete cookies" and "delete files" under the temporary internet files section. Be patient, if these folders are huge, it can take several minutes to complete the "delete files" task.

Next do a virus scan after making sure the virus definitions are up to date. Many viruses will slow things down considerably, and you might not get any other symptom.

Next, do a disk cleanup and maybe a defrag. Look at the hard drive properties and see if the hard drive is nearly full.

These are the main things that slow down an internet surfing/e-mail machine. Good luck.

 

[Erasmus-X]

Also, edit your Startup items in msconfig (go to Start -> Run and type 'msconfig' in the command line) to disable any startup items that are unnecessary. These are usually small programs and applets that run in the background and/or your system tray. Unnecessary startup items often include IM agents, custom audio mixers, printer status applets, and media player (e.g. Quicktime, WMP, Winamp, Real, etc.) agents. Just don't accidentely disable your virus scanner components or your real-time protection will be worthless.

You might also want to try deleting some of your web browser plugins (these settings are located in Internet Options in the Control Panel). You'd be surprised at how many of these little things that your browser will gather over a few months - and most of them probably won't be used.

 

[wetcat007]

What OS? perhaps a reinstall could help?

 

[NuTechNot]

Run Ad-Aware and look for and remove spyware/adware.

 

[johnjkr1]

All of those are great suggestions.....clear your internet cache......run a free adware program...perhaps even visit housecall.antivirus.com and run a full virus scan....if that still doesnt solve the program, HP does have diagnostics available, but they are only decent at testing the hard drive