Incredible latency on an old PC

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gamerunknown

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This was an old family computer, now used exclusively by my parents. It's Windows XP SP2, with 256Mb of RAM. Recently running any process has become difficult, even loading thumbnails in explorer - which I've never seen occur before.

The computer has been slow for a few months, but I don't use it. I noticed, after a while, that the task manager had been disabled. I edited the registry to re-enable it and then tried a few things to see if they'd help, such as the windows error check, a defrag and an AVG scan. The AVG scan found viruses, trojan horses and tracking cookies. I used CCleaner to wipe the temporary files and whatnot to get rid of the cookies and AVG dealt with the other stuff. For some reason my parents had set NoScript to "Allow Scripts Globally", which I corrected. It took me long enough to get them to use firefox, heh.

I also began trawling the Add Or Remove Programs panel and My Documents to get rid of anything to free up space, and now the hard drive is about 50% empty. I then cut down the start up processes. Not sure if that'll help at all, but I thought I'd be thorough anyway. Still no improvement in terms of speed. I'll probably buy my father RAM for his birthday in June. As sad as that'll be, it might help a little.

Other than that the only other thing I can think of that might be causing problems is dust somehow reducing fan speed and making the CPU melt, but that's probably unlikely. If all else fails I may just open the case and blow on the inside :p

Does anyone know what I could do to further improve the speed of executing programs on the computer?
 
It sounds like you did a great job cleaning the pc up. I'd also agree with you on the ram side of things, 256Mb isn't doing much for you there. The only thing you didn't mention was the page file size. If that was reduced too much then the system is going to be VERY short on available memory.

Apart from that, there doesn't seem like much you can do. If the extra ram doesn't end up helping then, as Hefe said, you might have to do a reinstall of the OS.
 
Lol kind of sounds like my folk's computer. Tried to explain it the best I could that it's not 'because it's an HP' for the reason it's running so slow. 902mhz CPU and 128mb Ram just doesn't cut it now days with newer virus scans, the service packs putting a load onto an older computer and just simply years of running with the same OS.
 
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