Formatting?

dubtom

Lately my pc has started to act up. It's a dell dimension 8300,P4,3.00 GHZ, 3 gigs of ram,XP, fairly old at this stage, but when running ok performs well, including playing games like COD4, rfactor etc. It's locking up fairly consistently, even simple things like opening word can cause it stall and hang. I'm not getting any error messages or blue screens, just a freeze. System info states I have 90 running processes and if I ctrl, alt delete, the cpu monitor says it's running at 100%, I'm not sure if this is normal, or a factor of too much crap running at the same time. I have no idea how to stop all this stuff running permanently. I was thinking of formatting the drive and reinstalling, I'm assuming my problems are software related, basically because I have no exclaims in device manager, apart from PCI device, but that's been like that for a long time, it says no driver installed. So is formatting overkill.

yoyo

dubtom wrote: »

Lately my pc has started to act up. It's a dell dimension 8300,P4,3.00 GHZ, 3 gigs of ram,XP, fairly old at this stage, but when running ok performs well, including playing games like COD4, rfactor etc. It's locking up fairly consistently, even simple things like opening word can cause it stall and hang. I'm not getting any error messages or blue screens, just a freeze. System info states I have 90 running processes and if I ctrl, alt delete, the cpu monitor says it's running at 100%, I'm not sure if this is normal, or a factor of too much crap running at the same time. I have no idea how to stop all this stuff running permanently. I was thinking of formatting the drive and reinstalling, I'm assuming my problems are software related, basically because I have no exclaims in device manager, apart from PCI device, but that's been like that for a long time, it says no driver installed. So is formatting overkill.

Click Start>Run>type msconfig & press enter, under the startup tab untick all the uneccesary stuff, ie adobe launchers, java etc... Once you do this reboot and see if it helps, sounds to me like a background task is causing it! Hope this helps

Nick

Pangea

Whens the last time you formatted?
Formatting is not overkill, You should do it reguarly to make sure your PC is running fast, Most likely your registry is all clutterred up along with many other things and u need to start fresh. Also buy a hardrive to save all your stuff onto that ,dont use your PC for storage.

dubtom

Thanks lads for the replies. Did that msconfig,certainly cut down on cpu usage,jumping from 0 to 25% as I write,processes 57. I think though I will formatt, nearly 4 years of clutter and crap on this pc,95% of which I don't use,probably 60% was auto loaded with other stuff. It can't do any harm. Just have to find all my installation discs now.Thanks for the help.

BopNiblets

90 processes??! In comparison I've 37 processes...
Dell de-crapifier!

Also this is a handy site for after formatting: http://ninite.com

dubtom

Great links there BopNiblets,many thanks.

marco_polo

Have a look at this too. A word of caution: do not turn off a load of services all at the same time as some of them are critical for windows to function correctly, and if you do a big batch all at once it could be hard to remember which ones you have changed if something goes wrong (Yes I am speaking from experience, it is quite similar to looking for a blown bulb in a set of christmass tree lights ).

Do them one or two at at a time over the course of a few days making careful notes of which ones you have disabled, so if anything stops working you can simply re-enable that service again.

http://www.jasonn.com/turning_off_unnecessary_services_on_windows_xp

RolandIRL

A word of caution: do not turn off a load of services all at the same time as some of them are critical for windows to function correctly, and if you do a big batch all at once it could be hard to remember which ones you have changed if something goes wrong

if you use spybot (see free software sticky above) to turn off serivces, it shows which ones you changed in bold.

youcancallmeal

If you do a format now and re-install your operating system you will be probably be stunned with how fast your PC is. The initial bloatware that comes with Dell PCs and all the bits and pieces that have built up over the last 4 years add up to one very slow PC. The funny thing is a lot of people in your situation would just think its time to buy another Dell PC but with a little care and attention you can have your old PC good as new

danjo-xx

To get over this prob of too many progs loading at start up I chose....... 'selective start up' I know this is not ideal, but am I at any risk of causing other problems perhaps.