Clean install slow initially, sped up nicely

[asiafish]

I have a very "moderate" ThinkPad in terms of power. It is a 1.6GHz Celeron M (Yonah) with 1.0 GB of RAM and Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics. Slow is a bit too harsh a description, but sluggish comes close. With Vista, its overwhelmed, but XP SHOULD fly on this thing. After all, XP is now almost 8-years-old and back then 800MHz T21 was about the fastest laptop available.

Okay, so I just did a clean install of XP, applied all of the Microsoft updates including SP3 and a few ThinkVantage programs (power manager, keyboard customizer) and left off some of the more resource intensive (Access Connections). I use Office 2003 instead of 2007 and other than Adobe Acrobat 2008 professional, generally keep this machine very lean and mean.

So imagine my surprise when after fully configuring it, degragmenting the drive with Perfect Disk 2008 making sure there were no viruses or spyware hiding anywhere (I use AVG), I found that this thing was REALLY SLOW. Slow as in thirty seconds to launch Word. Slow as in 3 1/2 minutes for a full boot. Yes, there is some indexing going on in a new install, but these figures were ridiculous.

I was planning to reinstall and try to be even leaner, but haven't had the time lately, so I just used it as-is. Most of my use for this is very light anyway, word processing and some internet browsing. It is my writing machine, but my primary computer is my MacBook.

Just yesterday I finally had the time to do the reinstall, and started backing up my data to prepare, when lo and behold, the computer was quite fast. Quite fast, as in extremely. Boot up only took 1:40 and Word launches in 8.5 seconds the first time, instantaneously after that. I know caching helps and indexing slows things to a crawl, but this thing went from a sled to a rocket with absolutely no intervention on my part.

Guess I won't be reinstalling anything after all.

[Harryc]

It's the Gremlins I tell ya ..

[RealBlackStuff]

You can speed it up even more if you dump AVG 8 and replace that with either:
Avast http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html
or
Avira http://www.free-av.com/

AVG has turned into a real POS that slows down most computers!

[bishy]

Hi RBS,

Which of those two A/V's you mentioned would you say has the smallest footprint and uses least resourses?

Thanks very much in advance for your advice.

Speak to you soon.

bishy.

[RealBlackStuff]

Avira has the smaller footprint AND the better detection rate than Avast.

Do a Google with avast avira footprint to see for yourself.
I was a fan of AVG for quite a while, but since AVG-8 it's all downhill.

I have now joined the (paid for) EsetNOD32 fan club for all our home PCs and laptops. You don't even know it is there, except for when it has just updated the virus definitions...

[bishy]

Hi again RBS,

Thanks for the info, I will have a look at NOD32 and decide between that and Avira.

Once again thanks for the help.

Speak to you soon.

bishy.