I’ve always been able to get some help with computer issues from people on this forum. Here’s my deal.
I continue to try to nurse my 5 year old Dell. It’s a Pentium II, 350 mhz, with 288 of functioning RAM. I’m running Windows XP Pro. In the last week or so, I’ve had problems with audio and video. At best, it is choppy and sputtering and un-listenable/un-watchable. Usually, after a while, it just stops. This seems to affect ALL audio & video processes, regardless of software. Internet audio feeds. The DVD player. Any audio device (WinAmp, Real Player, Windows Media Player, etc. etc.). Audio and video seem to be similarly affected. The only other thing I’ve noted is a really lengthy boot time and a slight sluggishness in loading programs. But, I’m not sure I’d even notice all of that if not for the audiovisual problem. When I re-boot, it seems to help slightly & temporarily.
Well, try clearing out all your Temp files (including your temporary internet files) and emptying your recycle bin.
It’s possible you’re having memory allocation problems and if you’re running out of free disk space, that will compound it.
You don’t need a Mac unless you’re going to start a video production company. I end up crashing the Mac at work whenever I sit down at it–I automatically use the Windows keyboard shortcuts and totally trash it.
As someone mentioned, clear your caches and empty your recycle bin. Then, see how much free disk space you have. If it’s less than a few hundred meg it’s time to clean up some data files (do you have a lot of audio and/or video files you can move to CDs?) or get a second and or larger hard drive. If you haven’t upgraded the drive in the past I’m guessing it’s probably a two or four gig drive and you can fill that up pretty fast with audio and video files.
If none of the above helps you might consider “downgrading” to windows 98. XP is a decent operating system but there are two problems with it on older machines. 1) It takes a fair amount of horsepower just to run the OS. 2) It uses “generic” drivers for many older devices (video cards, etc) and they aren’t as efficient as the XP-drivers created for modern hardware.
I don’t use XP myself but we have a couple of XP machines at work and my boss has done a lot of work with it. It appears to install and work just about flawlessly on recent machines with recent peripherals but nowhere near as well on older machines.
(edited to add) - A PII 350 with decent memory isn’t a bad machine, although its bus and memory architecture isn’t as good as the last generation of PIII and PIV machines. Still, last year I bought a bunch of surplus PII 233 machines from work and set up one for each of my kids, wife, a spare linux box for myself, and one for my son-in-laws parents. Even the PII 233s work fine for audio and video with a decent graphics card using Windows 98. In fact, those machines were our multi-media development boxes just four years ago!
John
[ This Message was edited by: OutOfBreath on 2002-12-29 11:27 ]
Thanks. I seem to have plenty disk space. What’s irritating to me is how obscure these problems can be. The last time this happened it took weeks, plus a major hardware overhaul, only to ultimately discover that the problem was Norton Internet Security. Un-installed that program and it took care of everything.
Hi Dale,
unless you really need XP you might be better with Win98SE or Win98ME. XP seems to overpower anything other than Pentium4/AMD Athlon.
Cheers, Mac
Edit, John’s right about Driver problems etc, If you know what make/model your sound card/graphics card is you MIGHT be able to download specific drivers, Ask an expert opinion first though as you could make things worse.
[ This Message was edited by: MacEachain on 2002-12-29 12:05 ]
After cleaning up your temp. internet files and other “trash”, I would suggest you “Defrag” the machine. If it hasn’t been done in a while they start to freeze and slow right down. You probably already do this, but for those of you who don’t, go to start, run, type in defrag, choose drive C and off you go. It can take hours so do it then go to bed.
Another solution is to re-format. It takes time and a lot of backup but it is like moving house. Once you do it you find out how much junk you have been tripping over that you don’t need! The computer runs almost as if it is brand new, much faster. Of course this is a last resort, but not a bad one.
Best of luck!
Sandy
edited because I can’t spell!!!
[ This Message was edited by: Sandy Jasper on 2002-12-29 16:43 ]
I don’t know if this will fix your problem, but go download a program called ADAWARE (try google to find it) and run it. It’ll clear your system of all the cruddy spyware and adware buzzing around in the background (which I have found can slow things down substantially).
Otherwise, I don’t know what to tell you. I’ve got a crappy pentium II here as well, and it seems to get scrummier every day…
ps. try running a defrag program as well…
[ This Message was edited by: TelegramSam on 2002-12-29 19:54 ]
In layman’s terms…
Everytime your hard drive saves data, it uses the next available space for the write. You’ve got thousands of files on the drive, especially with internet and database operations you may have lots of files that are only temporarily stored leaving ‘holes’ of available space when they are deleted. When saving a large file the drive may place the file in several ‘holes’ as it writes. Over time, takes longer to find the information as it gets fragmented across the drive.
Running a defrag program rewrites the information into contiguous segments so the time to gather up the files is reduced, making your computer’s hard drive run more efficiently.
In many cases it’s just microseconds saved… it really older hard drives needing maintenance it can save several seconds each time the drive looks up a file.
Dale,
All the advise given is good; but, with a Dell machine, your first step should be to call Dell’s support. Tell them what you have and that you’re running XP. They have an extensive database of problems and resolutions. It may be as simple as replacing a driver or dynamic link library (dll).
Second, if you have 288 memory I’m assuming you have 2 16 meg simms and 2 128 meg sims. If so consider replacing the 2 16 meg sims. XP is a memory hog and would be even more so with an older machine. Another upgrade that may be possible and in-expensive is your processor, the folks at Dell could tell you if that’s a viable possibility.
Much of your problem does stem from running XP on anything but a Pentium4. My understanding is that XP is designed to use the instruction set extensions introduced in the pentium 4, especially the multimedia components (audio, video).
I just bought a used Dell (Pentium III 600 Precision Workstation w/256 meg ram, 40gig HD). I installed Windows 2000 in part because it didn’t have the horsepower to run XP efficiently.
Defrag - De-Fragmentation. Fragmentation occurs when the operating system writes a large file in a bunch of small fragments spred out over the hard drive. It happens because the file is started in the first available space and when that proves too small for the file, it just breaks up the file and inserts a pointer to the next fragment. De-Fragmentation re-writes all the files into contiguous areas. The big thing it does is it puts all the empty space at the end which makes it easier for your system to store data.
Hope this helps a little and doesn’t take up so much of your time that you don’t get a chance to …
Enjoy Your Music,
Lee Marsh
[ This Message was edited by: LeeMarsh on 2002-12-29 20:56 ]
I just got a new computer for the December 25th holiday. It has a 1.3Gigahertz chip hardwired into the board (AMD of some kind) and 256Megs of RAM.
I’m running Windows 98SE right now but was going to switch to XP tomorrow. Is this a bad idea? The comments about XP being written to utilize special Pentium-4 instruction sets has me worried.
Would Windows 2000 be a better option? I always found Windows NT to be kinda slow, but stable…I assume 2000 is the same way.
I’d stick with 98SE, until XP been out for another year. Let someone else find all the bugs in their new machines. XP SE will come out with half the bugs fixed. First editions of most OS need time to mature. If you need something that requires XP, that’s different, but a lot of software actually prefers 98 or the NT/2000 archeticure. In fact theres some SW/sound card combo’s that only work on 98. Also the current XP MS licensing approach is a potential nightmare for longterm support. I think the next edition will make some adjustments.
Maybe not, but in the next 3 months I’m part of a team thats going to upgrade 1200 computers running P4’s, and its going to be MS2000 not XP. So I may be biased.
Usually the problem has to do with background tasks running as services. The most common troublemaker is something called indexing service. To turn this off, right click on my computer, and select manage. This brings up a window called computer management. On the left should be a tree view. Expand ‘services and applications’, and click on services. Scroll down in the right pane until you see ‘Indexing service’. Right click and select properties on that service. Then hit the stop button, and set startup type to manual.
BTW, indexing service is background task that does basically like what it sounds like. It indexes your files and such to make searches faster when you do a find files.
Searches will still work if you turn it off, and this might solve your skipping problem. Be forwarned though that just randomly turning off services can cause stuff to stop working… for example, print spooler must be running to print.
