Actually, I "downgraded" to Win2K when I got this machine, as it came with
XP Home. I had had a series of warrantee repairs with my previous Dell and
they finally sent me this machine that was a model up and had more of
everything than the one I had bought, but it had XP home on it. 2 years ago
I finally replaced the HDD for insurance (and over 4x more space) and
installed XP Pro. No noticeable performance difference from Win2K, much to
my relief. As I recall XP was up to SP2 by the time I put it in, so maybe
that helped.
I'd add RAM but I've always been at the published limit. If I had a larger
SODIMM to try I'd do it, but I'm not inclined to buy a bigger RAM stick
unless I have a reasonable belief it'll be addressed. The following version
of my laptop allowed up to 1GB, but not this one.
As far as defrag, caches, start-up apps, etc., I'm pretty aggressive about
that stuff. I've been running IOBit Smart Defrag in the background for 6
months or so and it's done a fine job with no noticeable overhead. It seems
to shut down at the first hint that I want the computer for myself. I also
run CCleaner and EasyClean every month or so to do a littel housekeeping.
Norton ? Ummm, not for years. Once I was a 100% Norton believer, but their
stuff has been soooo piggy for many years now. Besides their sneaky credit
card schemes and high prices, it's also essentially impossible to actually
speak to a person there unless it's to read him your credit card number.
Lose an activation code ? Tough.
I've tried lots of AV software, including the highly-touted AVG, but nothing
has been very satisfactory. AVG's Control Center bogs my computer down so
much that I'd only run it occasionally to get updated virus defs, and then I
shut down the Control Center again in order to be able to use the machine.
It wasn't important for anything, the AV portion ran all the time anyway.
I've tried several other free ones. And since I've cleaned viruses off
maybe 5 MacAfee-equipped machines with their latest virus defs (years ago) I
just won't even try that. On Tony Vaccaro's recommendation from the other
day I just installed NOD32. Heard about it for years, and so far so good,
but we'll see after a few days.
Thanks!
Karl
>> What alternatives are there ??
>
> Haven't tried it myself, but a friend swears that Linux runs orders of
> magnitude faster than Windows on those old machines. If you don't need
> any
> special-purpose applications (like games or such), that might be a way to
> go.
>
> No doubt I'll get flamed for saying this, but my home machine was about
> like
> yours until I stuffed in more RAM for editing graphics. Still running
> Win2K
> Pro, nowhere near as slow as you describe. You could also try downgrading
> to Win2K ...
>
> And I'm assuming you've already done the usual stuff : cleared out
> unnecessary processes and features, disabled file indexing, defragmented
> the
> hard drive (including the swap file), cleaned out any spyware, etc. I'd
> also uninstall Norton AV if you have it, it can be an invisible CPU hog.
>
> Randall
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