XP grinding to a halt :-(

Two fresh installs of XP Home and XP Professional, both genuine.

After all the updates, no unusual programs installed and the problems start.

USB sticks - first not recognised - then painfully slow file transfer speeds.

Re-boot to the usual "Bliss" theme and no icons at all - re-boot and F8 and into "last known good configuration that worked" and back to "normal".

Very slow (both XP Home and Professional) at opening, "my computer" and then looking through the contents of Drive C:\.

A general "feel" that XP is not solid and stable as it was a few months ago. A subjective statement I know and certainly open to question.

Some weeks ago I started a thread about XP "wobblies" and maybe a paranoid statement about Microsoft trying to kill it's child, "XP".

So, Win 7 it is now but I miss a lot about XP.

Cheers from Aunty Jack.

 

how did you wipe your drive before your clean install??

did you use dban and then do a full format??

are your drivers from the manufacturer or from one of the driver pack sites??
and did you install the chipset first before any other driver??

did you update through microsoft updates or through wsus or autopatcher??

I just did a clean install 3 weeks ago, used dban, did a full format, and got 85% updated with autopatcher, installed my antivirus, ran a scan, then finished updating at microsoft updates, have not had any issues so far.

 

My XP install is still in good working order like new. The main reason being, I manually screened all Microsoft updates (I don't necessarily trust all of them to keep XP intact).

 

Hi Elizabeth23,

RAW format first and then let XP install do a full format, not a quick format

Drivers from Dell's official site

Chipset actually not needed -BIOS updated to Ver A07 ages ago - so, drivers installed after in that sense

Updates through Microsoft

Maybe XP does not want to visit my PC anymore or is allergic to Dell hardware somehow, don't know. Never had these problems until the last series of Malicious Software Removal Tool updates from Microsoft in the last few weeks.

Oh well, still have XP on a spare hard drive to investigate one day.

Cheers from Aunty Jack and thanks for the ideas.

 

Why is your chipset not needed??

I do not use MSRT, malwarebytes and my antivirus work to keep malicious programs from being installed.

be interesting to find out what is the cause.

 

How much Ram do you have? back before i upgraded my dells Ram, it would be painfully slow to do anything, sometimes the whole thing would just crash(256mb>1gb)

 

Hello Elizabeth23,

I did have 1Gb RAM but a day or so ago, "frzzzz", two RAM chips went dead. Now I only have 512Mb. Old RAM chips for the Dell are not obtainable. Put XP Home back on the system slowly and carefully, checked everything each step of the way. Working quite well actually. (did have Linux Mint 17.1 XFCE on it for a day but I am not keen on Linux anyway).

So far no problems even with reduced RAM.

The whole thing may have been RAM failure related but I am not sure.

Cheers,

Aunty Jack.

 

does not tell me why chipset is not needed, what is the make, model and model number of the dell??