m680 Help Needed ASAP! Computer SLOW!

Hey guys,

I am one of the early M680XL adopters and while I love most things about my computer, it seems my machine is incredibly slooooow! I have the 1.8ghz model and I threw in 2 sticks of Corsair 512MB 533mhz PC4200 memory and its set to dual channel memory int he bios automatically. It also has the 60GB 7200 rpm Hard Drive and I even did a fresh install of WinXP with no junk at al. I would think this machine would scream, but it takes forever and a half to start up, log in and shut down. My girlfriends Dell 700m with 1.6ghz flies past this thing at almost ANYTHING. Is there something wrong with my machine? I noticed this issue more so AFTER changing ut the memory from the 512mb 400mhz to the 1GB 533mhz which makes no sesne.

Anyway, any and all help and info is TRULEY apppreciated!

Please email me with any advice or possible issues or if I should just call Gateway.

Thanks,
Hayden

 

I wrote a review about Inspiron 9300 covering a bit of this subject but it seems to me you made all the right moves .

What you can do is this :
How slow is it ? 1.6 with 7k60 takes ~60 seconds for full boot , including entering a password and really going over all the hidden proccesses that go on even after the desktop appears . Is it slow on other tasks as well ?

Upon reboot go asap to taskmanager and see the proccess working , try to find out which take the most CPU usuage , and if you can do without it ?

Do you have Norton AV ? I had the same issue and it turned out to be all those programs it ran at startup like registry checking , I changed to a *free* AVG and now it flys .

Ofcourse you can time it with the new memory and with the old to make sure it isn't it .

Edit :

oops , almost forgot - is there intesive disk activity while turning slow ? if YES then :
is your HD defragged ? is your swap file setup right ? do you use P2P or other HD cruching programs ? did you setup your page file dynamic or static ? did you elect to clear the swap file ?

 

Make sure that your laptop doesn't have any network mapped drives that are not available.

If you use this laptop between networks (home and at work) and you have mapped some network resources at work, then XP will spend some time when logging in trying to connect to those network resources.

Alex

 

My brother with his Dell i9200 had this same problem, after he reinstalled windows, it worked fine again. A suggestion that was mentioned in his topic was to check if your computer is running hot. If it is, your CPU will lower the power to produce less heat, thus performance degrades.

I hope you get your problem resolved.
--Hellmanns

Gateway 7426GX
----------------
-AMD Athlon 64
3700+ 2.4GHz
-1024 MB ram
-ATI Radeon 9600