SLOOOOOW Compaq Startup

[kplarose]

I have a Compaq Presario 5700Z. The PC has Win98 installed with all if the relavant updates applied. Problem is the PC takes an extremely long time to boot up, like a couple of minutes. Once it boots up the first time you open a program - say MS word - it takes about 30 seconds to open the program. If I close Word and then re-open it, it come right back up in a normal amount of time and will continue to do so until I reboot the machine. The time lag happens with every time I open a program for the first time. The machine has an AMD Athlon 800MHz CPU and 128MB PC100 memory and I have plenty of HD space left. I've tinkered with all of the startup programs and have swapped out the memory, but still have the same problem. Anyone have any helpful hints?

Thanks,
Ken

 

[rockerfellerz]

The times do sound a little too long. I would run a scandisk, then defrag the drive. Also you could set a permenant swapfile rather than let windows manage it. Set the minimum and maximum size to the same number, say 256mb which should be plenty. This should be a bit faster. make sure to do the defag first so that all the space used for the swapfile is in one place on the disk.
One other thing to check for is spyware, this can really slow down your computer. go to

http://www.lavasoft.com

and get the latest version of adaware and run it. This will find and remove a lot of spyware/adware.
There are more things to try but this is a start...
Hope this helps
RocKeRFelLerZ

 

[ThaVolt]

I got the same PC and the same problem but i already have adaware and removed all of the spy-adware.. i tried many things but nothing seems to work..

Greetings,

Jelmer

 

[kplarose]

Thank both of you for your assistance - it turned out to be a defective hard drive. Even after F-Disk and format everything ran real slow. I replaced the hard drive and then things went back to normal speed.