Not enough memory, only 256 MB with 64 MB of that being used for video. An extra 256 MB would make a world of difference.
They have a lot that loads at start up and each thing use a portion of the 192 MB that is left:
USB Card Reader (built in)
Notice that updates are ready
Network
Printer
Quicktime
Malwarebytes Pro
Windows Messenger
Yahoo! Music Jukebox
Avast
HP Digital Imaging Monitor
Adobe Photo Downloader
And Sound when it does load
No malware but they are really into music, the drive has lots and lots of songs. They have three or four player installed.
If you read all my post again you will see that I did use norton’s removal tool.
It has Malwarebytes Pro installed, it finds nothing.
Avast’s boot time scan didn’t find much, and it moved what it did find to the chest.
Working on this thing going so slow is wearing me out, I have told them that it needs more memory before I try to do anything else to it, but they didn’t want to spend the money so I’m not going to waste any more time on it.
Yes more ram would make it run better. But on a clean instal of xp will run quick even as low as 128mb of ram but alot of hard drive churning though!.
Must be alot of start up items try msconfig and reduce the group start up items to try and gain some speed?
How much free space is on the hard drive? if it is less than 18% free you will start to have problems running windows. System restore points take up alot of room on the hard drive. try cleaning out them?/ clean out c:/windows software distrobution /download files folder (will contain GBs of junk in here (safe to remove)
ah avast did find something and moved to chest and must be something on the computer then!
Any up to date security is going to have problems on 256, if not now then soon.
I have a 256 machine…one of the only things I can stomach running on it is Puppy Linux, so I can imagine XP would have probelms.
The time has come for you to invest in some RAM, imo. Cheap to buy, easy to install…unless you are just having so much fun on 256, you don’t want to leave (doubt that). ;D
Go into msconfig\startups and untick Adobe Photo Downloader, Yahoo! Music Jukebox, Windows Messenger, Quicktime as these program can start when needed and do not need to start at boot.
Also go to avast settings - troubleshooting and set avast services to load after other system services, would also help to not run malwarebytes in realtime on that system.
I am very close to the same situation as far as using Avast free antivirus 6.0.1203 on a Compaq Presario SR1710NX with ONLY 256 RAM memory running Windows XP with service pack 3. Of course my situation is different in that I’m using service pack 3 instead of service pack 2.
I agree that it would be wise to go with service pack 3 as it is or will be very soon the only XP operating system that MS will support going forward for awhile. Also there are a lot of issues with service pack 2 that are resolved with service pack 3 which includes not just security but compatibility as well. I would that I would agree that with 256 MB ram it gets pretty darn slow when updates are running i.e. Avast for example, to the point that the computer very nearly comes to a stand still for some time. Because of this I ONLY have Avast that runs “automatic updates” along with PEN for email notification.
That said, I didn’t see any appreciable increase in slowing down at these times with service pack 3 compared to service pack 2.
As far as the missing volume control icon in the system tray is concerned. I’ve noticed that a couple of the icons WILL disappear from the system tray from time to time. They include the volume control icon mentioned in this thread and in my case PEN email notifier as well. What will happen is they will disappear for a while and usually return, but sometimes will not.
I have improved on this situation by not having ANY system update programs running in background with the ONE exception of AVAST. So I’ve got “Windows Defender” on “manual” updates as well as “Automatic updates” in the “Security Center” (program updates) as well as “HPDJ Task bar utility” and “HP Software” updates etc. These are all a drag on the system and are utilities I can do manually at my convenience.
By keeping the start-up processes that would normally be running all the time at a minimum like I mentioned above all I have to deal with is when Avast updates which as I mentioned admittedly does really bring the system to a crawl. Other than that however, I have generally AVOIDED the “missing icons” issue in the system tray including the volume control icon by limiting the update types of programs that start-up on boot-up thus this pretty much addresses the issue in this thread and the system runs reasonably fast considering the limited RAM as long as AVAST IS NOT UPDATING THE VIRUS DATA BASE THAT IS :-[
You don’t think Windows Defender (WD) is worth having as a second layer of malware protection?
So the “real time protections” for WD takes up a lot of RAM?
Task Manager shows WD (MsMpEng.exe) using 388 Kilobytes to 1.5 megabytes. By comparison Avast (AvastSvc.exe) is generally running in a range of about 20 to 45 times that using approx between 8-17 Megabytes.
Or are you saying the “real-time scan” takes a lot of CPU usage? Unnecessary duplication with Avast?
I’ll try ANYTHING to avoid the system slowing down to a crawl (generally locking up) whenever AVAST IS DOING VIRUS DATABASE UPDATES!!.
If you really think it’s that much of a resource hog (I have no idea) then it would still seem to be a good backup scan device for malware (just don’t use the real-time protection and instead manually update the database and manually scan). Am I wrong here?
Defender on xp is pretty useless and poor detection rate,best to just uninstall it.
If you want an excellent scanner for second opinion use malwarebytes, with the free version you just run an update before scanning.
All these latest post are OT. Probably the Volume icon in the tray area is just hidden by other icons. The “Task Bar and Start Menu Properties” has an option to “hide inactive icons”. Since users are not using the volume icon so frequently, then Windows hides it. Changing the setting ( UN-ticking the check box of that “hide inactive icons” option) should display all available tray icons. In addition, the Volume icon “can” be disabled (independently of the “hide inactive icons” setting). So, if both settings are correct, the icon should be displayed (specially if the sounds are actually being heard).
If I’m not mistaken, this was already mentioned before. The only thing that this topic needs is a simple post with confirmation that changing this specific setting is the “solution”.
