I think WinXP has killed my parents' 11 year old PC

It's a Dell they bought in 1999 and it worked amazingly well up until a few years ago when they were advised to upgrade to XP. At the moment next to nothing is installed on it apart from Office 2000 and some bare essentials and yet the thing is incredibly slow, taking 4-5 minutes to become usable after booting and taking very long to launch any program or display anything on the screen when exploring in any browser.

Specs:

P3 600mhz
768mb SDRAM
Voodoo 5 5500 PCI*
Sound Blaster Live!

*: I think this may be the source of the problem, as no official drivers for XP exist, but the problems persist even with the latest community developed drivers from 3dfxzone.it

Anyone have any ideas? I am 100% certain there is no type of malware infection.

 

The problem probably isn't the Voodoo 5. It's the 768MB of RAM and the P3-600 with Windows XP, and possibly just a slow older hard drive. Check the memory usage. If they have a lot of programs started on bootup, that can be a big part of it too.

The video card won't cause slow bootups. That's entirely the hard drive/RAM/CPU being loaded up.

 

Spec is OK, ( nevergoingto be fast though ) but at that age I do suspect hard drive corruption or junk temp files.

have you tried running ccleaner and defraggler?

also click start, run, then type MSCONFIG and go to the startup tab to see what all is hidden running in the background on loadup as well.

 

it has minimal services starting automatically and almost nothing loads on bootup apart from MS Security Essentials

it originally had 256mb ram, the upgrade to 768 made literally no difference in the slowness

isn't WinXP supposed to work fine all the way down to 128mb?

 

It's supposed to work down to 128MB. It's not supposed to work fine

It may be the hard drive, and could be the CPU just being loaded. Have you defragged the hard drive? Do you know how fast it is? Is it running in DMA or PIO mode? PIO can absolutely kill performance like you're seeing: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/ide-dma.mspx

 

It is just reaching msse min system req ... you better uninstall that.

Get linux on that old machine

 

if minimal services are starting up I suspect the Hard drive. go to pirisoft.com and download and run both ccleaner and defraggler.

XP will work on 128 mb etc but after each service pack was sent the reccomended spec bumped up a bit more. and if it has been a few years since it was clean loaded may want to think about a new clean load.

and yes MSSE is going to slow it down some as is ANY modern security suite.

 

I regularly run CCleaner on it when I visit them and I defrag the hard disk every so often as well (albeit with XP's defrag app, not Defraggler - I'll try that).

The HDD is the original 11 year old one that game with the PC when they bought it, a 7200RPM 20GB Hitachi drive. I'll check if it's in PIO mode and report back.

EDIT: Also I've tried avast, antivir and MSE on this PC, as well as no security software, and have similar slowdown issues regardless. I doubt MSE is the culprit. Again, there is literally next to nothing installed on the PC. It has MSE, IE7, Office 2000, WMP 9 and Adobe Reader 9. That's pretty much it.

 

Sure enough I just checked the device manager and Device 0 on the Primary IDE Channel is set to PIO only.

Should I change it to DMA if available?

 

yes and do it in the BIOS dont change drive settings in windows in old machines

 

I'll do it as soon as I can get to Dell Support and download the latest BIOS rev for the PC. I imagine there's probably been an update to whatever version of PhoenixBIOS it uses since 1999. For some reason Dell's site isn't opening on any device at the moment.

EDIT: Why not just do it in the windows device manager, though?

 

Everything sounds about right. XP circa 2010 on a really old computer like that = slow as balls. The original XP would have probably run just fine on it, but not today's. If you can't or don't want to upgrade the hardware, I recommend installing Linux on it. There are plenty of tips and tricks for trimming down XP to as little as possible, but I'm afraid it might not be enough and it could be pretty difficult if you don't know what you are doing.

 

because it wont change, drive modes are handled at the hardware level ( HDD, BIOS and Drive controller ) windows actually has nothing to do with it back then

 

Try this simple program called soluto.

Soluto ? Anti-Frustration Software

 

Why? I've done it before, it's never hurt my machines. The worst that will happen is Windows will run into errors and it will fall back to PIO mode.

 

Another problem could be an incompatibility with early UDMA66 controllers. Had that on a P3 PC based on a BX board with a UDMA66 controller originally built in 1999 and later upgraded in 2001. It could never run XP, at least not with UDMA66 turned on, as there was no driver in XP for that particular controller.

 

Yes. also read here: DMA reverts to PIO | Windows Problem Solver

Add-On controller? IIRC, the BX supports UDMA2 (UDMA33) only.

Michael

 

welp, can't find anything in the BIOS to change the data transfer mode
nothing in the IDE settings that's editable seems related

It's using vA04 BIOS. The current version is A11 but I can't find a download anywhere on Dell's broken and poorly designed support/download site (it's a Dimension XPS T600).


EDIT: Also I haven't opened this PC in ages, but if I recall correctly the hard disk is a slave to an internal zip drive, could that have anything to do with it?

 

If anything, switch the hard drive to master, and zip drive to slave, or put on completely different ports. Not sure if the zip is funny about being as master or slave though, and make sure you adjust jumpers appropriately. The BIOS may fix the issues your having altogether though if you can get ahold of it.

 

I don't think I want to mess around with the jumpers or anything inside the case. I've long since lost any documentation on anything in the PC.

The .vbs file on one of the links provided above seems to have kicked the hard disk into ultra dma mode 2, it still takes forever to boot up (despite a lack of actually having to load anything) but once it's been running a few minutes things are significantly snappier.

I am experiencing some strange behavior in Defraggler, though. When I first analysed it reported 21% fragmentation and after a defrag it only went down to 17%. I ran it again and it's at 18%. It seems to find 500 new fragments and a few dozen fragmented files every time I run it (this is with a cleared cache, etc).

 

Sounds like the drive may be on it's way out, then.

 

There were certain BX boards which had an addon chip, and that cause a whole lot of mess with XP.

 

Know where I could get a replacement PATA drive that'll work on this ancient setup?

 

PATA HDDs with 80GB are still available. (Example: WD 800AAJB ). Stay clear from anything larger than 120GB.

Michael

 

Found the stuf in less than a minute
See if this link works for you:
Drivers & Downloads

Michael

 

thanks

so... it doesn't flash from Windows


I don't think I've even seen a floppy disk in years.

 

Do they have a floppy disk drive? http://www.freedos.org/ http://www.linfo.org/freedos_floppy.html

 

I know how to make a boot disk, I just don't think there is a floppy disk around anywhere.

 

I've installed Windows XP on a machine with 64 MB of RAM, a P2, and a 10 GB hard drive, and have it on a machine with 256 MB of RAM, a 500 mhz P3 and a 30 GB drive and both run fine for general stuff like web surfing and word processing.

I even brought the latter to school a year or two ago when I had to send in my laptop for service. Survived finals week report writing with Office 07, Firefox, and WLM open just fine.

Your Dell should be able to run XP even better than what my old desktops can.

 

Yeah, which is why I'm so confused by the issues I have with it. The DMA thing did make it significantly better, but still not where I'd expect.

 

When was this, and did you install SP 2 and 3? I ran XP on lots of old hardware back in the day, but now I just don't think its possible.

 

ubuntu to the rescue.

 

I run XP on a 700mhz P3 and 512 MBs of RAM and it runs decently fast... can do basic web browsing and games from it's time decently.

 

If you want to teach my ~60 year old parents to use Linux be my guest.

I'd rather struggle to keep XP working.

 

On the Acer P2 with 64 it was a few years ago but def after SP2 shipped. I don't know the machine's current status as I set it up for a relative and gave it to them.

The HP originally shipped with 98 SE but I installed XP SP2 on it in summer of 2006 or 2007. It's still running well on XP SP3 today.

For another case. My uncle bought a Dimension 2400 brand new with 256 MB of RAM, a Celeron 900 and Windows XP. He hasn't touched the memory inside because he's very much a computer n00b. It's on SP3, and while a bit sluggish (I suspect it's something he installed...) it gets the job done.