Comments on: Slow Windows 2000 workstation

By: digitalcreature

digitalcreature — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 20:04:45 +0000

I’ve tried a range of defragmentation software and personally prefer Raxco PerfectDisk, it has improved performance of many troubled workstations for me (http://www.raxco.com) the softwarwe does offline defrag which will defrag your paging file, system file, file table, etc. Just view the presentation on the site for more info.

Disabling all unnecessary services would also help, run scandisk / chkdsk and see if you have any bad sector or structural error.

By: kerm

kerm — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 11:47:59 +0000

Slow is a relative term. How long to start up vs. a “fast” W2k system? Anything reported in the event logs? In particular look for correctible memory errors. Absolutley: replace any dimms that show any kind of error. Do you have other Dell 4100s to compare with? With Anti-spy, ad-ware and spybot, you can try removing them one at a time and see if the situation is resolved. If not, is there an undesireable interaction between them?

Roxio shouldn’t be a problem unless you’re selecting from a lot of different folders and then, if they’re all local, there should not be a problem. I frequently burn CDs with files across a 100-base-t net without problems.

Check the workstations Indexing Service settings (Settings > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Services &
Applications > Indexing Service). Sometimes the indexing service gets set to index the same space multiple times. Not a beneficial situation and can take a long time. Indexing should never run during working hours unless you intend it to.

If the user works with large and complex documents, spreadsheets, etc., .5 GB is not an excessive amount of memory.

It is true that the more complex the tree, the more load, but that shouldn’t cause a noticeable slowdown.

Is your AV scanning the disk during working hours? I’ve had AV disk scans run during working hours and it is a hog.

By: bobkberg

bobkberg — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 11:43:33 +0000

Superfreak has pointed out a key element, which I’d like to expand on. Has it always been this way? Did it build up to it? Or was this a relatively sudden change? The nature of the development of the problem is itself a clue.

Michont also makes an excellent point. Especially if the paging file is fragmented. You might need Diskeeper or one of the other commercial defragmenters to defrag the paging file (if that’s the case).

Don’t forget to do full spyware and virus checks as well as looking for any background processes that don’t belong there – such as end-user added software (spyware or not).

You mentioned that the primary application is Office Professional, but didn’t mention specific things, or how much is loaded at once. PowerPoint is more memory and processor intensive than say Word or Excel (depending on the size of the documents in use.

Have you run task manager on the process and performance tabs to see what the cpu and memory usage is? And, as above, which processes are consuming cpu? Also, are the documents in question local, or loaded/saved across a network connection?

Bob

By: superfreak

superfreak — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 10:23:58 +0000

2 questions..

1. Is this a new issue with speed, meaning was it faster before??

2. How full is the hard drive?? Once over 70% full it will decrease overall performance..