slow?XP PRO, SP 3, MS Updates all installed. 1.96 Gb of RAM. 3.20GhzIt takes the system forever to boot up, the user finally logs in and it take forever before she can open up a program, (no matter what program it is: IE 8, AutoCAD, Explorer, MSCONFIG etc)What I have done:1) Installed and ran the following Scans:Malwarebytes, Glary Utilites, Spybot Search and Destroy, Ad-Aware. some Malware, Spyware and Adware were found and removed, I ran each program at least 2 times just to make sure there were no more problems. I installed and updated all of the scan software in normal mode than ran the scans in SAFEMODE. 2) Ran Trend Micro Anti Virus program and not viruses were found.3) Ran SCANDISK, it took several hours (step 4 of 5 took over 6 1/2 hours to complete, it was still running when I left the office and I don't know how long step 5 took) and when I returned the next day the logon screen was up.4) Defrag the hard drive - 2 times - both times it took forever. 5) went into MSCONFIG and unchecked all the startup programs and booted the system and still it is taking the system forever to boot up and login and do anything on the system.6) Hard drive has over 95 GB of free space so space is not an issue7) deleted the Temporary Internet Files.8) checked Device Manager for conflicts and there are none. What else can I do to check this system out before I format and install everything back on to the system. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!Thanks in Advance!Robin1 person got this answerI do too

yeap, it was not a windows issue, dell replaced the memory, motherboard, power supply (which went out when the system hung on me), they system was still running slow, replaced the hard drive and installed all the software and it is running just great!. thank you everyone for your suggestions!

All free?Hope this helps, Gerry Cornell

yes it was all free, the system was still under warranty, just by 40 days. LOL

1.96 gig RAM!Start there, add another 2 Gig. Can use 4 Gig in a 32-bit OS, but, will register as 3.2 Gig. Do not use mis-matched RAM units, ever. Then, you'll notice how smoother/quicker XP will run.This is the reason 'why' Scandisk took so long.....to do a check!Defrag, same reason.Are you having trouble....opening multiple windows, as well? Same reason! Not enough RAM.You've done everything else right way.Easy enough solution for you?

On Tue, 15 Feb 2011 17:25:50 +0000, cookie7746 wrote:Can use 4 Gig in a 32-bit OS, but, will registeras 3.2 Gig.  No, that's not quite correct. The amount of RAM that 32-bit Windowscan use varies, depending on what hardware you have. It's usuallyaround 3.2GB, but it can be very different.Here's my standard message on the subject:All 32-bit client versions of Windows (not just XP/Vista/7) have a 4GBaddress space (64-bit versions can use much more). That's thetheoretical upper limit beyond which you can not go. But you can't use the entire address space. Even though you have a4GB address space, you can only use around 3.1GB of RAM. That'sbecause some of that space is used by hardware and is not available tothe operating system and applications. The amount you can use varies, depending on what hardware you have installed, but canrange from as little as 2GB to as much as 3.5GB. It's usually around3.1GB. Note that the hardware is using the address space, not the actualRAM itself. If you have a greater amount of RAM, the rest of the RAMgoes unused because there is no address space to map it to. Ken Blake (MS MVP)

Thank you for your suggestions, however the issue has been solved! The hard drive was on it way to crashing. Once a new hard drive was installed and configured the system has been running smoothly.

What we missed:http://winhlp.com/node/10The signs were there for us to see.Hope this helps, Gerry Cornell