Quote:
Originally Posted by acropolite
I cleaned up a machine at the weekend with similar problems. It was an old PIII laptop with only 256Mb Ram. You could bake a cake while it booted and it wouldn't see an external HDD that was plugged in.
Nothing to do with service packs or updates, merely links to resorces that weren't there, some misguided apps and bloatware.
The PC had links, on the desktop, to USB devices that weren't plugged in as well as links to the net. Shortcuts to removable devices and or network resources on the desktop can bog XP down, as well as cause long delays when opening IE.
As well they had a sync utility which was trying to sync files that had been deleted from their HDD to folders that no longer existed on the removable device.
To top it off they had installed the mother of all bloatware products Norton AV.
Regarding AVG, I have found lately it's a real dog, several times it has removed parts of applications after detecting "false positives", I've since removed it and gone to AVAST antivirus, which is free for home use and very well reviewed. All my machines have auto update turned off.
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Hi
All the above seems to be a common problem with XP and the program sure gets slower and slower.
I scored a nice 3 MHz pentium off a friend a few months ago that had got so slow that it was useless and then got locked into a Norton AV loop that took about me about 2 minutes to get out of. The owner could not even do this.
The registry had over 2000 errors which took some time to correct. Over the next couple of hours I managed to remove most of the programs that were on the computer along with Norton AV and 5 GB of Ipod downloads.
After about 5 hours I had the computer down to its basics and was able to re-install some "essentials". The computer now runs as fast as it should and I have a useful spare computer.
Yes I could have re-formatted but this would have lost the factory installed Windows XP installation and there were no recovery disks. I wanted to retain the XP installation. I recovered the key and I have since made a backup image for the system.
I have all my computers running with the developement tools used fo compiling the source code for Stellarium. This allows me to test the stellarium svn version on different platforms as it is progressing.
Barry