Slow loading programmes

monvoy

Can anyone please advise, whenever I click on IE it takes about a minute for the actual window to open and then a further two mins or so before I can see and use anything onscreen. Is this normal behaviour for a eircom BB connection? This also happens with some other programmes such as MS office etc. Any help greatly appreciated....
Oh... also when I click on any links or drop down menus it takes a few secs to appear then its like "stop motion" ..sometimes freezes too.
Is my PC knackered?!?!?!

challengemaster

what spec pc?

monvoy

emachines 770 2.4GHz pentium 4 80GB
I have 44Gb free space !!
Surely this should be enough to run properly, eh?

AlmightyCushion

How much ram do you have.

monvoy

256mb ram ...{i think}!

Ruu_Old

It wouldn't hurt to stick another 256MB of RAM(at least) into the machine. See if using Firefox will make any difference to your browsing. No harm to run some anti-spyware and virus scans on your machine. Something like Spybot-Search and Destroy/Lavasoft Ad-Aware and AVG Anti-virus, avast! for spyware/malware or Anti-Vir for anti-virus if you haven't one already.

Mr. Presentable

Run your disk cleanup utility. Defrag you HDD. Go "Start" "Run" "Msconfig" and turn off as many startup programs as you can afford. More RAM would also help, but do these few simple things first - they'll make a difference.

The tax man

If you're not sure what ram your system has installed,click on start ,click on control panel,double click system and then you should see at the bottom of the panel that appeared the amount of ram on your system.
If it is 256mb, an upgrade in ram would help speed things up a bit. I had 256mb in my laptop and I upgraded to 1gb and it's a different machine.
As above run a few progs to see if any unwanted stuff is lurking on your pc.

Gadgetman496

First thing you need to establish is this:

Has this always been the case with this eMachine?

Or is it something that as happened recently or gradually over time?

If it's always been like that (But I suspect not) then extra RAM as suggested above will help improve the situation.

If it's something that only happened recently or over a period of time then you wold need to consider the following:

Did you install anything recently that would initialise at start-up & be a heavy demand on resources?

Have you installed edited or removed a lot of files/software over time that might have caused you hard drive to become fragmented?

If yes? you should defragment you hard drive. (Run it anyway to see what the "Analyse" report says)

Has your machine become infected by Mail-ware, Spy-ware or a Virus?
As suggested above, "Run some scans".

-

Orion

1 full minute? Or does it just seem like it? Either way I'd assume infection. I recently went over to our babysitter's house cos she told me their year old PC was really slow to "go onto the internet". Took me an hour to disinfect it completely.

Spybot is a must to clear down the bulk of the spyware I have to assume you have. And a good up to date AV application like AVG or Avast.

One question - you sure about 256Mb ram? - seems very low for a P4 machine. But not low enough to explain what you're saying.

unnameduser

If it takes 1 minute I would certainly think it is spyware. OP try scanning with Spybot, AVG antispyware, and superantispyware. If this doesnt help give hijackthis a go. You may want to post up the results here for someone to have a look at if your not too sure.

While your at it, try the other options already mentioned such as defrag and cleanups (Give ccleaner a go)

If you search this board a bit you will find that others have had similiar problems. Best of luck.

monvoy

Thanks for all the advice guys . I was a bit wary about asking some simple questions after reading some harsh replies on other boards/threads but you all seem very helpful . I'll attempt all the suggestions and see what happens
Thanksa again.