Inspiron 9300 incredibly slow!

I recently bought a used 9300 cheap to use for office tasks and movie watching. Its a Pentium M 1.7Ghz, 80GB 5400rpm Hard drive, Geforce 6800 256mb and I put in 2gb of ram. Not a barnburner by todays standards but should be a little demon for XP, right?

The problem is if you try to do any 2 things at once it cant handle it.

If I'm web browsing and try to extract a rar or zip file for as long as the extracting takes the mouse is suddenly seconds behind its movements, and scrolling down a firefox page is a chore in futility.

If I'm watching a video in VLC and I start to download something in firefox or limewire the video starts jerking, freezing and skipping sound.

This is not major multitasking, this is video player + browser and thats it.
The only other things running are avast antivirus and the Dell quickset and wireless utilities.

2GB of DDR2 5300 ram shouldnt have this kind of trouble. On my old comp with 768mb I could run photoshop + VLC + firefox with no trouble.

The windows install is only a month old.

One thing I noticed is that when I originally reinstalled it from the Dell cd's it was lightening fast but that was before SP2. Once I went to microsoft update and installed SP2 boot time went from 15 seconds to almost a minute. Its hard to comment on other speeds as I didnt really use it until I updated it to SP2, then I installed my programs.

Still, SP2 shouldnt kill the speed of a comp like this.

Any thoughts?

 

probably not, but I would try a fresh install. Also download a program called RMClock to control your voltage and multiplier. The system could be stuck at a low 800MHZ state thus why you are seeing issues. I used to have a Dell 9300, and that laptop was great to me. Also did you get the Intel chipset driver? Might want to try a different video card driver. VLC is a great program as its one of the few that uses your video card to take the load off of the cpu.

 

I thought it might be the clock speed but I also game on it and it's silky smooth playing Unreal Tournament 2004 at 1920x1200 with everything on high so it must be running at full speed when I game.

Honestly, the only time I have these problems is usual day to day tasks involving web browsing, music/video playing, downloading and extracting archives.

Got a link to a newer driver? The one from Dell is still from 2005 and last time I tried to install nvidia drivers direct I got a message telling me to only use Dells drivers for the 6800.

 

I recently reinstalled XP on an old eMachines desktop. Essentially, I had the same sorts of problems you're seeing, though not with the same apps. All of a sudden, Spybot slowed to a crawl, as did CCleaner. Surfing the Net wasn't too bad, but trying to do anything else at the same time was impossible. I uninstalled, then reinstalled SP2 and the machine went back to normal. Guess the first effort was corrupted, incomplete or just wasn't in the mood to cooperate.

Good luck with your machine.

 

Hmmm. Any other opinions that don't involve a format?

 

Did you try removing SP2?

 

How do you do that?