XP on (slightly) older hardware, tips?

[tefleming]

I picked up a laptop in the past couple of weeks (my first PC in several months, I've gone Mac for most of my needs) and it's a bit sluggish.

It's a Dell C400, Pentium 3m 1.33ghz, 1GB of RAM, 40GB HDD.

Those specs should be able to handle XP without much issue?

I'm running XP SP2, all the current patches - including WMP11, IE7. Office 2003, Firefox 2, Miranda IM.

Can anyone off some suggestions of ways to make this thing work better? I've already used Hijackthis to stop everything from starting at boot.

Thanks in advance

 

[Skitzer]

My primary machine is a Mac now but I have worked on Windows PCs for many years.
You've got better specs than my friends computer and XP runs great on hers.
She has an old Dell Dimension 4100 with P3 1GHz, 512MB PC133 and an 80GB hard drive.
When you say work better what do you mean? Is it slow when booting or all the time?
Have you checked Services to see if any are running that you don't need?
Any errors or warnings in the Event Viewer?
More info would help us with your problem.

 

[Noema]

Originally posted by: tefleming
I picked up a laptop in the past couple of weeks (my first PC in several months, I've gone Mac for most of my needs) and it's a bit sluggish.

It's a Dell C400, Pentium 3m 1.33ghz, 1GB of RAM, 40GB HDD.

Those specs should be able to handle XP without much issue?

I'm running XP SP2, all the current patches - including WMP11, IE7. Office 2003, Firefox 2, Miranda IM.

Can anyone off some suggestions of ways to make this thing work better? I've already used Hijackthis to stop everything from starting at boot.

Thanks in advance

That computer should handle XP very well. I recently did a clean install of XP on a friend's laptop which had been overrun by trojans an spyware. It had similar specs to yours, but only 512MB of RAM, and yet XP ran great on it.

Go to My computer (right click) >>> Properties >>>> Advanced Settings >>>> Performance >>>> Visual Effects (don't remember exactly; I'm not on an XP box at the moment) and try unchecking all the boxes to disable fading menus, visual styles and the like, which can make XP sluggish.

Is the HDD running on DMA mode? If it isn't, that can also affect performance. Go to Control Panel >>> System to check your devices and make sure.

You can also try going to 16-bit color on display properties, as well as disabling Cleartype.

Finally you can try disabling Indexing to boost performance a little, though that will result in slower searches. Right click on any drive and you can disable it from there.

 

[rogue1979]

turn off the advanced settings for the video like suggested.

turn off system restore.

run msconfig and turn off anything you don't need.

turn off indexing on your hard drive.

If you do all these things it should make the notebook snappier.

Of course check for malware/spyware/viruses.

A clean install of WinXP always help too if it has been awhile.

 

[Domer]

I am running XP pro on a 300mhz PII thinkpad with 228mb ram, 12gb hd. Runs fine, just get rid of all the stuff you don't need (read above). All I use it for is wireless web surfing and it does it all fine.

 

[Stumps]

I had XP running on a K6-2 400 with 256mb ram and a 20gb harddisk a while back, as long as you give XP more than 128mb(512mb preferably, but 256mb does the job for a web surfer) ram it runs fine on just about anything.

 

[Rottie]

my friend's compaq laptop with amd k6-2 333 with 160mb runs XP just great

 

[DC Hertz]

Another AMD K6-2 user here.

I'm using XP Pro on my older a 400 MHZ, 320 MB of Ram Computer.

Not as fast as my 2.8 GHZ Computer, but fast enough for lite Internet use.

 

[13black]

Right click your My Computer Icon and select properties. Go to the advanced tab and select the settings button for Performance. Now select "adjust for best performance" and click apply. Visually it will look like you are running win 2k, but it will be faster.