TOPIC:

So I have this client that's complaining about slowness on her pc. I come by, clean s**t out, delete temp files, cookies, adjust the pagefile, turn off the XP cool visual crap, and defrag the HD. That's pretty much all i can do without spending money or formatting the whole pc right?

Well, after a couple days she calls back and says that her pc is still slow and that it isnt any faster than it was before. So I tell her what I did the other day and told her that the next step is upgrading the RAM but she doesnt want to spend any money!! She says "my computer never was this slow before. I want it be as fast as it was before"

At this point, i wanted to slap the lady in the back of the head and knock some sense into her but she's works for one my clients and i didnt want to go to jail for aggravated battery or anything like that..

But anyway, I just wanted to vent a bit. I know some of you guys can relate to situations like this.

One of the things I would check is the status of the task manager, how many processes are running there? compared to how much RAM is on the PC?. WinXP comes with about 23 processes running out of the box. If she has more than 35 then she roughly needs at least 1Gb of RAM, it also depends on how much memory each process is using. Try to lower the number of autostart programs as much a possible. You can find them in the following registry keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

Also check if one of the processes is taking a high CPU usage regularly or more often. Kill that one if it's not a system/necessary process.

Another thing that can slow down is the anti virus that is running. Many new AV packages (such as symantec and the newer AVG) are unfortunately CPU and RAM hungry. I currently use AntiVir and find it well tolerated, hope it stays that way though :roll:

A spyware scan might be a good idea too. I've seen several PCs slowing to a crawl and taken great delight in showing the user all the malware they've collected on there through their dodgy surfing.
Or, unfortunately, it might be just the familiarity curve. When the user first gets the machine they think 'wow, this is fast,' but after a while as they become familiar with it and they get faster. Then the little waits for their spreadsheet to recalculate that they never notioced before (because they were too busy trying to remember what to do next) start to loom larger than life and they moan. Same thing happens with microwaves and the like; our perceptions change but we say the change was in the system. There is a cure for this syndrome but you might not want to do the associated jail time...

@Solo

Yeah, I checked the task manager and the pc only uses about 300mg of RAM when idle. I disabled some startup programs with the msconfig utility. She has 1gb of RAM in the PC and it's expandable to 4gb according to crucial.com (I thought XP 32-bit only sees 3gb?).

The AV she's using takes up alot of resources, but I told we dont want to disable that.

@TheBishop

After talking to her yesterday, I'm thinking it's her perception. i even told her that the pc isnt slow and that she's just working too fast. I got her laughing so it eased some tension. lol.

But hell, I haven't even tried a spyware scan. That used to be one of my first t-shooting steps back when i used to fix pc's regularly. i cant believe I forgot about that! :-P

If the AV is resource-heavy why not try a different one? Or is it a company standard?

@Solo

(I thought XP 32-bit only sees 3gb?).

I am sorry to ask the question which doesnot belongs to this topic. I am using 4GB of RAM to all the XP32 bit machines.. In all the machines, when I check, how much RAM is present, XP shows only of 3.24GB in place of 4GB. So, I dont think that XP can support 4GB of RAM.