XP Home startup aps

On Tue, 10 Jun 2014 15:08:53 -0500, "BillW50" wrote:

In ,
KenK typed:
When I run msconfigstartup in XP I see a lot of stuff I don't
recognize. Is there a utility to help analyze these or do I need to
Google each of them?

My computer is getting VERY slow.

Slow booting up or slow in general? Slow booting up is generally too
many startups. Slow in general is usually something else. My MSCONFIG
Startup is about three pages worth. What is yours like?

Holy ****.....

On my laptop with XP-Pro, I have 9 items.

In Win98, I only have 4 items that load. (using Msconfig). I have
always disabled everything at startup except parts of Windows itself.


I actually had 10 in XP, but I disabled a thing called "Digital Line
Detect". I dont have a clue what that is for, but it was something that
was with one of the Lenovo drivers and it got installed and dont seem to
be needed.

On Tue, 10 Jun 2014 14:35:53 -0400, Paul wrote:


On my laptop, I had to remove the printer package
for my printer, because it was eating too many
resources *even when the printer was unplugged* .
Now what kind of idiot writes software like that ?


Probably the same idiots who write these tv commercials that say "If
you've sufferred a stroke, heart attack, or death, call this number
800-xxx-xxxx so we can file a lawsuit". I'm still trying to figure out
how a dead person can make a phone call .....

"Daave" wrote in
:

KenK wrote:

My computer is getting VERY slow.

Please answer the following:

1. How much RAM do you have?

512M

2. What antivirus program or suite are you running?

Kaspersky

3. Have you scanned for malware with MBAM or aswMBR?

No, I rely on Kaspersky.

Here is my usual "causes of sluggishness":

1. Malicious software (malware). You need to rule this out first! This
page has excellent information:

http://www.selectrealsecurity.com/malware-removal-guide

2. Not enough free space on the hard drive. At the very least, you
should have at least 15% free space. A good goal to shoot for is 50%.

About 75% free.

3. Certain programs that are designed to combat malware (e.g., Norton
and McAfee). Ironically, they can slow things down because they simply
use way too many resources. Sometime they cause conflicts with other
programs. Fortunately, there are other antimalware programs available
that use far fewer resources (e.g., NOD32, MSE, and Avira).

4. Not enough RAM, which causes the PC to overly rely on the pagefile.
A quick way to determine if this is happening is to open Task Manager
(Ctrl+Alt+Del) and click the Performance tab. Then note the three
values under Commit Charge (K): in the lower left-hand corner: Total,
Limit, and Peak.
The Total figure represents the amount of memory you are using at that
very moment. The Peak figure represents the highest amount of memory
you used since last bootup. If both these figures are below the value
of Physical Memory (K) Total, then you probably have plenty of RAM.

True in my case.

In
case you want to explore this further, you may run Page File Monitor
for Windows XP:
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_pagefilemon.htm

5. You might also want to check that your hard drive's access mode
didn't change from DMA to PIO:

Will have to research that soon using your links. I suspect not.

http://www.technize.com/2007/08/02/i...d-drives-too-s
low-while-copying/ and
http://winhlp.com/node/10






--
"Things would be a lot nicer if antique people were valued
as highly as antique furniture!" Anon

KenK wrote:
"Daave" wrote in
:

5. You might also want to check that your hard drive's access mode
didn't change from DMA to PIO:

Will have to research that soon using your links. I suspect not.

http://www.technize.com/2007/08/02/i...d-drives-too-s
low-while-copying/ and
http://winhlp.com/node/10

You can use HDTune and run the read benchmark on your
hard drive. And see if it looks like sustained reads
are happening at the right rate.

http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe

Old drives would be 65MB/sec near the beginning, and
about 30MB/sec at the end.

A modern drive (cheapie) would be 135MB/sec near the
beginning, and around 70MB/sec near the end. hard drives
have a "declining curve", while SSDs and USB flash drives
are a flat line. And if you ever see a flat line, the
rate can tell you whether some artificial bottleneck
is involved.

The very best hard drive, is 180MB/sec at the beginning.
Whereas the very best SSD is in the 500MB/sec range.
Nothing in the house here, does more than 135MB/sec :-)

In this old example, you can see how jumpering a drive
for operation in SATA I mode (150MB/sec), limits the
transfer rate to 123.2MB/sec. When the disk connection
is not a bottleneck, the faster portion of the disk
(near the beginning) gets a bit more "wavy" in the trace.

http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/8...scomposite.gif

A hard drive in PIO mode, gives a flat line at around
7MB/sec, instead of a nice curve.

Paul

On 6/13/2014 1:02 PM, Paul wrote:
Nothing in the house here, does more than 135MB/sec :-)

You have no SSD drives yet? They are really nice. You know how fast
running applications from a RAMDisk is like. Well it is a lot like that.
Not quite the speed of a RAMDisk, but most applications launch in a
blink of an eye. Most everything is no wait time at all.

I pretty much moved all of my XP, 7, and 8 Gateway M465 machines over to
SSD now. Next I'll be upgrading my Alienware machines over to SSD. They
are already running dual video cards (works like dual core GPUs), but
they also support dual drives running RAID as well. Two drives
delivering simultaneously 500MB per sec each... wow! Talk about smoking!

--
Bill
Gateway M465e ('06 era) - Kingston 120GB SSD - Thunderbird v24.4.0
Centrino Core2 Duo T7400 2.16 GHz - 4GB - Windows 7 Home SP1

In message , Mayayana
writes:
[slow]
Open Internet Explorer - Tools - Internet
Options. Delete all cache (stored files) and
set the cache limit small -- maybe 50 MB.
[]
Not saying you aren't right, but:
1. Does this still make a difference for non-IE-users?
2. Even for IE users, _why_ does it make a difference? I'd have thought
if anything things being in the cache ought to speed things up (that's
what it's for!), and anyway it'd only make a difference to web browsing.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

What is the point of a really good degree, if you're just like Harold Wilson?
That really cut me down to size. - Sister Wendy Becket, on DIDs 2012-12-16
(She, like he, got one of the best degrees at Oxford in her year.)

| 1. Does this still make a difference for non-IE-users?

See my post below the one you responded to. I've
run into it numerous times. And it's easy enough just
to set a small IE cache size. (Maybe 5 MB instead of
1 GB.)

| if anything things being in the cache ought to speed things up (that's
| what it's for!), and anyway it'd only make a difference to web browsing.

It could speed things up for browsing, though
it's really outdated for that purpose because
1) even bloated websites now load almost
instantly and 2) most commercial sites load
dynamically, so the cache doesn't apply. (My
own site uses PHP to dynamically create the
page based on the browser. As a result it's
always seen by browsers as a new page, even
if they just visited 2 minutes ago, so the cache
is never used.)

On Thu, 12 Jun 2014 23:01:40 -0400, wrote:

On Tue, 10 Jun 2014 14:35:53 -0400, Paul wrote:

[snip]

Now what kind of idiot writes software like that ?

Probably the same idiots who write these tv commercials that say "If
you've sufferred a stroke, heart attack, or death, call this number
800-xxx-xxxx so we can file a lawsuit". I'm still trying to figure out
how a dead person can make a phone call .....

If a relative dies, you could be considered to have suffered a
death.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

KenK wrote:
"Daave" wrote in
:

KenK wrote:

My computer is getting VERY slow.

Please answer the following:

1. How much RAM do you have?

512M

2. What antivirus program or suite are you running?

Kaspersky

3. Have you scanned for malware with MBAM or aswMBR?

No, I rely on Kaspersky.

Here is my usual "causes of sluggishness":

1. Malicious software (malware). You need to rule this out first!
This page has excellent information:

http://www.selectrealsecurity.com/malware-removal-guide

2. Not enough free space on the hard drive. At the very least, you
should have at least 15% free space. A good goal to shoot for is 50%.

About 75% free.

3. Certain programs that are designed to combat malware (e.g., Norton
and McAfee). Ironically, they can slow things down because they
simply use way too many resources. Sometime they cause conflicts
with other programs. Fortunately, there are other antimalware
programs available that use far fewer resources (e.g., NOD32, MSE,
and Avira).

4. Not enough RAM, which causes the PC to overly rely on the
pagefile. A quick way to determine if this is happening is to open
Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del) and click the Performance tab. Then note
the three values under Commit Charge (K): in the lower left-hand
corner: Total, Limit, and Peak.
The Total figure represents the amount of memory you are using at
that very moment. The Peak figure represents the highest amount of
memory you used since last bootup. If both these figures are below
the value of Physical Memory (K) Total, then you probably have
plenty of RAM.

True in my case.

In
case you want to explore this further, you may run Page File Monitor
for Windows XP:
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_pagefilemon.htm

5. You might also want to check that your hard drive's access mode
didn't change from DMA to PIO:

Will have to research that soon using your links. I suspect not.

http://www.technize.com/2007/08/02/i...d-drives-too-s
low-while-copying/ and
http://winhlp.com/node/10

It's possible you have malware. Kaspersky is good, but you should always
run other scans. MBAM is one of the best programs out there for this,
and the version I recommend is their free one. Also you don't need to
worry about it always running in the background; you merely run it on
demand.

Regarding RAM, I think you should give us all those figures referred to
above: Total, Limit, and Peak. I say this because although 512 MB might
prove to be enough RAM, there is a chance that it isn't.

Please tell us the specs of your system:

Make and model of PC should do it. If this was built, we will need to
know the make and model of the motherboard for its specs.

Finally, go into Task Manager again and figure out which processes are
using more than their fair share of resources:

Ctrl+Alt+Delete | Processes Tab

You can sort by CPU and Mem Usage. We need to know which ones are
showing high numbers.

KenK wrote:
When I run msconfigstartup in XP I see a lot of stuff I don't
recognize. Is there a utility to help analyze these or do I need to
Google each of them?

My computer is getting VERY slow.

Thought of something else:

Open Task Manager and select the Performance tab the next time your PC
is slow. What does your CPU Usage show? Sometimes if this number is high
(and if there is no malware or leftover bits of Norton or McAfee), the
culprit is Windows itself -- sometimes Search 4.0 (which is horrendous;
I always recommend removing this update) and sometimes the Windows
Update program itself.

But with repsect to malware, you really need to run programs IN ADDITION
TO Kaspersky. MBAM should be the first. Also, aswMBR sometimes catches
malware that other programs miss. I'm not saying you have malware, but
we do not know with absolute certainty that you don't; it needs to be
ruled out.

Finally, you should definitely make sure your hard drive's access mode
didn't slip into the slow-as-molasses PIO mode.

"Daave" wrote in :

Regarding RAM, I think you should give us all those figures referred to
above: Total, Limit, and Peak. I say this because although 512 MB might
prove to be enough RAM, there is a chance that it isn't.

Total 514,800
Linit 1,252,683
Peak 734,408

Looks like I was wrong yesterday. Evidently I need a Gb.

Please tell us the specs of your system:

Make and model of PC should do it. If this was built, we will need to
know the make and model of the motherboard for its specs.

9+ year-old eMachine T2984

Finally, go into Task Manager again and figure out which processes are
using more than their fair share of resources:

Ctrl+Alt+Delete | Processes Tab

You can sort by CPU and Mem Usage. We need to know which ones are
showing high numbers.




System idle process 74%
AVP.exe (twice) 11 and 6% I'm pretty sure this is Kaspersky

As I type this.

Using dial-up connection to net. Cable and satellite too expensive as I
never watch TV. No phone company broadband available in my rural area. Not
that interested in on-line speed anyhow - just do email, Google research
and Usenet.

--
"Things would be a lot nicer if antique people were valued
as highly as antique furniture!" Anon

KenK wrote in news:XnsA34C65FE3D1Dinvalidcom@
130.133.4.11:

AVP.exe (twice) 11 and 6% I'm pretty sure this is Kaspersky



Nade a mistake. As I typed that Kaspersky was scanning system. Now that it
quit AVP at 1%.


--
"Things would be a lot nicer if antique people were valued
as highly as antique furniture!" Anon

"Daave" wrote in :

But with repsect to malware, you really need to run programs IN ADDITION
TO Kaspersky. MBAM should be the first. Also, aswMBR sometimes catches
malware that other programs miss. I'm not saying you have malware, but
we do not know with absolute certainty that you don't; it needs to be
ruled out.


I'll probably try MASM Monday when I'll have more time. I expect it will
take several or more hours to run.



--
"Things would be a lot nicer if antique people were valued
as highly as antique furniture!" Anon

"Daave" wrote in :

Finally, you should definitely make sure your hard drive's access mode
didn't slip into the slow-as-molasses PIO mode.


I looked in Device Manager IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers Primary (and
Secondary)IDE channel Advanced Settings

Primary IDE is listed as Ultra DMA mode 5
Secondary IDE Ultra DMA mode 2


--
"Things would be a lot nicer if antique people were valued
as highly as antique furniture!" Anon

KenK wrote:
"Daave" wrote in :

Regarding RAM, I think you should give us all those figures referred to
above: Total, Limit, and Peak. I say this because although 512 MB might
prove to be enough RAM, there is a chance that it isn't.

Total 514,800
Linit 1,252,683
Peak 734,408

Looks like I was wrong yesterday. Evidently I need a Gb.

Please tell us the specs of your system:

Make and model of PC should do it. If this was built, we will need to
know the make and model of the motherboard for its specs.

9+ year-old eMachine T2984

Finally, go into Task Manager again and figure out which processes are
using more than their fair share of resources:

Ctrl+Alt+Delete | Processes Tab

You can sort by CPU and Mem Usage. We need to know which ones are
showing high numbers.




System idle process 74%
AVP.exe (twice) 11 and 6% I'm pretty sure this is Kaspersky

As I type this.

Using dial-up connection to net. Cable and satellite too expensive as I
never watch TV. No phone company broadband available in my rural area. Not
that interested in on-line speed anyhow - just do email, Google research
and Usenet.


http://www.cnet.com/products/emachines-t2984/specs/

Intel Celeron D 340 / 2.93 GHz S478
845GV (no AGP slot?)

Looks like it takes 2x1GB max. PC2700 is what they list.
Given the price of RAM these days, the prices are
less than I expected.

http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/compat...Machines/t2984

Paul