5 Year Old Computer Running Very Slow

Lately (last 6 months or so) my computer has been running much slower than I am used to. It is about a 5 year old Dell Dimension 5100 running XP professional. It has a pentium 4, 3.0 GHz processor with 1 GB of RAM. The hard drive is 70 GB with about 50 GB used. I tried to get rid of all the temporary files and de-fragmented my hard drive and did not see any increase in performance. I also checked the Performance tab on the windows task manager (Ctrl + Alt + Delete window) and never noticed my CPU useage high. Next I thought I might have a virus or something and I went to the Safer Networking Forums. An extremely helpful individual there helped me through some diagnostic things but didn't find anything malware related. Here is a link to that Thread. The individual that was helping me there suggested I post here. I also seem to have a lot of things show up in the Processes tab of the windows task manager window also but I don't know what most of them are so I have left them alone. I have Norton anti-virus, Windows Defender and Spybot on my computer and I occasionally use CCleaner to clean temporary files, ect. Do I have too many of these types of programs? Has anybody else had similar problems with older computers? Am I in need of a computer upgrade? Thank-you for any help or insight.

Hi 2bsss

First light advices:

1. Maintenance on a computer running Windows XP (parts “Windows XP has a utility that checks the data on your hard disk drive for potential problems and fixes them”, “Downloading and installing operating system updates” and other parts of your choice).

2. Remove all programs from the computer that are no longer needed.

3. Make Paging and Registry files defragment with portable tool PageDefrag.

4. Try portable tool SysInternals Autoruns to perhaps find accumulate remnant services, drivers and processes from applications you removed or other unwanted application components and some third-party auto-starting images that have been added to your system and slow system performance.

5. You could also check the Event Viewer to see if there are any warnings or errors How to view and manage event logs in Event Viewer in Windows XP.

I have Norton anti-virus, Windows Defender and Spybot on my computer and I occasionally use CCleaner to clean temporary files, ect. Do I have too many of these types of programs?

You use Norton anti-virus, Windows Defender and Spybot, but if I’ve saw correct Lavasoft Ad-Aware too. Norton anti-virus is anti-spyware protection too. Think that you would use Norton and Windows Defender as real-time protection, and Spybot and Lavasoft on demand protection. That means to deactivate (disable) Spybot resident real time protection application called Tea timer.

Am I in need of a computer upgrade?

If you have had not sudden performance problem I will exclude infection and computer hardware failure.

If it is possible, consider upgrading:
1) your memory from 1 GB to 2 GB
2) the larger hard drive

Until upgrading, please download and use free version HD Tune. This tool can be used to measure the drive's performance, scan for errors, and check the health status (S.M.A.R.T.).

Until upgrading, please check eventually Device Conflicts with Device Manager.

Thank you for the replies. I am going down the list of things you suggested and got to the autoruns application. I have a ton of things come up in the auto run list. How do I know which ones I should uncheck and which ones to leave checked? Thank you for any help.

The way that I do it is Google the name of the application (sometimes it's hard to tell what application runs what) and see what it does. If it's something you know you don't need starting when the computer does (example: if you don't use Microsoft Office every day, but some sort of Microsoft Office app is starting on startup, you probably don't need it), stop it from running on startup. If it's important, or you're not sure, don't mess with it. Also, a good way to find out what those unknown processes are is simply to Google them. Simply type the name of the process into Google and search it, you'll typically find enough results to figure out exactly what the process is and if it's safe to end it.

First you’ll have to save the current Autoruns file - File/Save. There is a Compare option that you can later use to track changing you have made and items being added to your computer and making it slower.

Check Options/Hide Signed Microsoft Entries so you’ll only see the non-Microsoft software in the list.

Press Everything tab.

You must be patient and find accumulate remnant services, drivers and processes from applications you removed or to recognize other unwanted third-party application components (columns Description and Publisher). Many wanted applications configure themselves to start automatically when you log on so that they can automatically check for updates, and don’t ask permission before inserting themselves in your logon process and almost never provide an interface to let you disable their autostart functionality.

When you find a suspicious application, you can get information about it in Lower pane when you click on the application or right click and Properties. If this doesn't provide enough helpful information, you can select a Search Online, bringing up the results of a Google search for the application. You can also even jump to the applications location to take a closer look with command Jump to.

To disable temporarily an auto-start entry uncheck its check box. If you find obviously suspicious process you can delete them by right click and Delete command.

Personally I have in addition unchecked all applications with blank icons and File not found Image Path too.

If you can afford, do a reinstall of Windows XP. That would make it faster.

2bsss

You can look for the suspicious entry much easier and faster if select Verify Code Signatures in Autoruns Options menu. This attempts to ensure the authenticity of entry that are signed with digital signatures (Verified), so you can focus only on the third-party processes signed with Not Verified and blank in Publisher column.

Take a note that if an item is listed as Not Verified, that does not necessarily mean that the file is malicious. Another possibility is that the file does not have a digital signature – so there is nothing to verify.

If you still have dilemma which entry should uncheck – post here.