Windows XP Partition Very Slow-Help Please

Hi, I'm wondering if anyone might be able to help me out. I have a Macbook and run Windows XP via Bootcamp for college work. Lately the XP partition is getting slower and slower. It used to just take ages to log in but now everything about it runs at snails pace. Even simple things like switching between Firefox tabs is taking forever. I've been sitting here for the last 15 minutes trying to open an 18 page PDF. Opening emails on Outlook is also borderline impossible. Its getting to the stage where its pretty much unusable, which is worrying because all my college work is on the XP partition.

Anyone out there have any suggestions on how I can improve the XP partition performance or what may be slowing it down. Its really affecting my work in college now at this stage. Any help is mucho appreciated !

 

It sounds like it is time to reformat that partition and clean install Windows. It is generally a good idea to clean install Windows (at least XP) about once every 6 months for some "spring cleaning." I have done that with all of my Windows XP machines since day one including my desktop I purchased in 2002, my notebook in 2005, and my notebook tablet from 2006 all running some variation of Windows XP. This type of performance can also be due to malware, viruses, or another malicious content. A physical problem with the hard drive might also be to blame but it is always best to rule out any software issues first.

The nice thing is that you can boot into Mac OS X, read your Windows partition, and copy any files off of it onto USB media so you won't lose anything. I would then reformat that partition and install Windows on it again. That will remove anything that was slowing your system down whether it be a clustered registry or malicious content. Then just copy your files back off of the USB hard drive/thumb drive and you will be good to go.

 

Have you tried the basics? AVG scan, Spybot scan, adaware scan, disk defrag, scandisk etc. Then windows + r, "msconfig", and take a look at startup progs.

I usually reformat once a year/2 years without any problems. And the only reason I reformat is usually because I end up moving things in obscure places that I'm far to lazy to delete manually.

 

Right click on the task bar, and open the task manager. See if a program is using all you CPU or memory.

 

Thanks for the feedback guys. Have ran virus scan and spyware checks and nothing showed up. Gonna try defragment the disc to see if that helps. Formatting is a last option as I'm worried that somewhere in the course of the backup my references for my thesis will be lost and that would be catastrophic to say the least. There's a good chance that won't happen but I'm just paranoid incase it does. Thanks again

 

Well, just go through OS X and copy the files onto that partition and a USB drive just to be safe. That way you have two copies of your files. You should never, ever, ever, ever rely on a computer's primary hard drive to store permanent files. You should always have a backup (whether it is online, on DVD, on a thumb drive, or on a secondary hard drive) of your important files especially since you are working with a notebook (and their hard drives are known to fail) and Windows (though I would still say the same thing about OS X, it is just that I have to reformat my Windows systems quite a bit so I have learned to never store anything important on the primary hard drives of my systems).