Ian Hopkins wrote in
:

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
You really need more than 128 for WinXP... It's a resource hog (at
least compared to linux)
Now you're talking my language! I have a dedicated machine running
Red Hat 9.0. It's been "up" for over 3 months now. It *does* like memory,
though. I'm running 512 Mb in that one but that may be overkill.

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.
Uninstall Norton
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.
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?

Defrag your disk and upgrade file system to NTFS if it's not already.
Is this a new install of Xp or was it already there?
Factory install... NTFS. I'm personally not a big lover of NTFS but
not for really valid reasons. I maintain our phone company's main
computer and usually do what I do at night via a network connection NTFS
has tight file restricitons and won't let me access system folders over
the network. I can go in with PCAnywhere and do it, but that's draggy. I
usually just drag my butt across the street and work on it. A Fat 32
installation doesn't have those restrictions.
Thanks to all of you for your help and suggestions. I've replied to
two different posts here and think I got all the questions covered.

--
I child-proofed my house but they are still getting in.