Posted on 11/07/2009 5:50:40 PM PST by Neidermeyer
Download. Ccleaner and run it to clean out dead files. It’s free. Cnet has it. It might help.
Download. Ccleaner and run it to clean out dead files. It’s free. Cnet has it. It might help.
Did you run diagnostics on the hard drive and memory chips?
If all else fails try a system restore to a safe point before the problem surfaced.
One other note, some Dell produced last year had similar issues that required a return to the store. Studio models I believe.
Have you run msconfig to see what are your startup programs? You might want to uncheck what you don’t normally use.
One more note...get more RAM, 512MB is not really enough anymore. 1-2GB preferable.
When it stalls out, open the task manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) and see what’s eating your CPU.
Go to My Computer, and check the properties on each drive to ensure that indexing is turned off - number one reason why Dell’s come to a creaping crawl.
Either your hard drive is on it’s last legs, your memory has something wrong with it, or your motherboard is fixing to die.
Running Windows 2000, I doubt Dell produced it last year...LOL
Next time it happens, turn off your antivirus/spybot/etc and see if that fixes it. Sometimes these things periodically go into overdrive and slow everything to a crawl. If the problem is worse when loading sites with lots of extra stuff (commercial news with a zillion ads, eBay listings, etc), try turning off Phishing Filter — it screens every single frame/item that’s trying to load, and this can easily be in the dozens for a single webpage such as the examples I gave.
Startup is clean , I prefer to alter that through the “expert” menu in “Spybot S&D”.
512MB should be plenty to run W2K SP4
512 is max the mb will recognize ,, and is PLENTY for W2K-Pro.
Is your computer plugged in?
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I would think that would happen at every startup... creating an IX for the vtoc should be fairly quick and painless..
And honestly, Windows 2000 simply can’t support a lot of what’s on today’s websites — that’s probably a big part of your problem. But before giving up (assuming you don’t want to upgrade) make sure you have the highest version of Explorer that Windows 2000 can support, and that you have installed all the random stuff that modern webpages want, to the extent that Windows 2000 is able to support them (but there are some key ones it can’t support).
I had these issues with a Windows Me machine, refused to buy a new computer with Vista, and ended up being very happy with a refurbished HP Pavilion with XP that I got off eBay — $175 including shipping, restored to original factory configuration, and original factory discs included.
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I'll do that .. I think I have a good (pre XP) copy of Norton Utilities somewhere .. or maybe the dell website has a utility.
Is this one of the small form factor 150s by any chance? Those things cook hard drives after a few years like nobody’s business. They won’t stop working altogether, but they’ll just slow down so much that they’re not worth working with any more.
If you happen to have a spare hard drive knocking about, I’d swap it out and try that.
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