On Sat, 15 May 2004 18:26:58 -0500, "Lil' Abner"
wrote:

Just got done working on a Compaq of the following description:
Compaq Evo D300 Desktop Series
Evo D310v Model with Intel 845G Chipset
1.8-GHz with 400-MHz Front Side Bus
Has 128-MB DDR Synch Dram PC2100 (266-MHz) Non ECC

Operating system is XP-Pro.
It was slow to start with. No updates had been done. I updated it to SP1
and installed the rest of the critical updates. Norton was up to date.

Norton? Get rid of it.


I
did a full system scan... it was clean. Found a moderate amount of adware
and spyware and removed it all. Only 5 items checked in Msconfig... all
normal stuff. Task Manager doesn't show anything unusual running. It is
*still* slow. I have a 850 Mhz machine of my own (one I built) that will
run circles around this one.
Dunno why it shipped with only 128 Mb ram and I have ordered another 128
for it, but I don't really look for that to speed it up much.

Actually that may be by far the greatest performance increase possible.
Constantly swapping out to pagefile is a dreadfully slow way to run an OS,
let alone trying to get any work done... but even so, 256MB just barely
adequate, typically 512MB plus is needed for more demanding jobs.

I didn't look in bios but these days there's not much you can change and I
don't want to make it unstable.
Is this just the nature of the beast?

Take a look at the services, disable everything unnecessary and uninstall
3rd party applications fitting same "unnecessary" description. This is
particularly beneficial when running with so little memory. Differences
in HDD age can also make a difference, and you didn't even mention if
it's a Celeron or P4.

If all else fails, backup the current OS partition and do a clean install,
compare them.