Why is it soooo slow

[Norihagafan]

Please please help,

I have "upgraded" from XP to 7 and it's so so slow. My pc is not the most up to date, but it's running 2Gb RAM, Athlon XP 1.85ghz and it's a fresh install. Everything takes for ever to load. The worst thing being media center (but that's a different story)

I am putting together a "new" pc this weekend running a 64 dual core & 4Gb RAM but I want to keep the present one to run day to day tasks.

Any help would be great thanks in advance

 

[richc46]

Two Gb on 64 bit is the minimum. You may not be able to do much better. You could try ready boost. I will also get a liitle more information and return.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/readyboost.aspx

 

[richc46]

From our excellent tutorials

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/11728-speed-up-performance-windows-7-a.html

 

[IggyAZ]

Please please help,

I have "upgraded" from XP to 7 and it's so so slow. My pc is not the most up to date, but it's running 2Gb RAM, Athlon XP 1.85ghz and it's a fresh install. Everything takes for ever to load. The worst thing being media center (but that's a different story)

I am putting together a "new" pc this weekend running a 64 dual core & 4Gb RAM but I want to keep the present one to run day to day tasks.

Any help would be great thanks in advance

Welcome and glad you came here for help.
I will try by starting to ask you a few questions.
You know a 1.85Ghz is really slow for Win7.
If you know about your computer could you please add the information in your user profile so we can see what you have. If you don't know you can download a great program that will tell you what you have. It is called Belarc Advisor and is free. Everyone here uses it.
LINK
Belarc Advisor - Free Personal PC Audit
Just look at the top of the page for FREE DOWLOAD.

How much computer skills do you have? Can you go into your device manger and check and see if you have any EXCLAMATION points next to any of your hardware?
Go to CONTROL PANEL, SYSTEMS, DEVICE MANGER and look at the list.

This is enough for now and I'm sure we will have more questions to help you resolve your slow computer.

 

[surfasb]

It also helps to know WHERE and WHEN it is slow.

 

[stormy13]

it's running 2Gb RAM, Athlon XP 1.85ghz

Old Socket A (462). Sounds like it could be due to lack of any proper driver support in Windows 7, depending on what the motherboard is. As IggyAZ said, post up the rest of the specs for it.

 

[RedBirdDad]

I've run it on a 1GHz Pentium M with 1GB of ram. Not a screamer and no Aero but it runs quite well. Actually quite useable.

Good advice by IggyAZ and richc46.

 

[valtonray]

as a side note media center itself has higher system requirements than windows 7 does, your pc probably just isn't up to snuff when it comes to it. my personal recommandation would be to disable as many features as you don't need in 7, even running the classic theme would have a noticable improvement on speed. you may want to try a free alternative shell such as emerge desktop that uses a fraction of the resources explorer.exe uses as well. basically the more you can trim windows down the better it will run on dated hardware.

 

[MacGyvr]

Two Gb on 64 bit is the minimum. You may not be able to do much better. You could try ready boost. I will also get a liitle more information and return.

Explore the features: Windows ReadyBoost

I am running 64 bit Ultimate on a 2GB machine (older dual core processor, 2GB max memory) and it's very smooth and quick to load anything I want. No speed issues at all.

 

[valtonray]

if you have made sure all of your drivers are up to date and followed our other suggestions you may want to consider cleaning up your hdd. or separating your partitions. the more data and programs you have the slower your system will run as it has to search for the data it needs. also if you could give us your full system specs that could be very helpful in troubleshooting your problem.

 

[Victek]

Two Gb on 64 bit is the minimum. You may not be able to do much better. You could try ready boost. I will also get a little more information and return.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/readyboost.aspx

.
Note that the OP did not say he's running the 64 bit version of Windows 7. We need him to give us more information.

 

[IggyAZ]

Might hold off on this one until he shows back up.
He hasn't been on for awhile now.

 

[Norihagafan]

Sorry for the delay, work takes me out a lot & getting online is a problem.

I have updated my user CP & I think the best thing for me to do will be to use my new build for 7 & return my old PC to XP.

The specs for old PC are

CPU: 1.85Ghz AMD Athlon XP2500
Motherboard:Gigabyte GA-7VT600
Graphics AGP:NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200
PSU:300w
Soundcard: Integrated
RAM:2Gb DDR400

New Build
CPU: Athlon64x2 6000+
Motherboard:ALiveNF5-eSATA2+ R3.0
Graphics:Gigabyte GV-R435OC-512I
Soundcard:Creative Sound Blaster Audigy SE 7.1 channel surround
RAM:6GbDDR2 CorsairPC6400
PSU:480w

I will have to get home before I can let you know what spec of 7 I have loaded, but any help with making my old pc run better would be great

 

[stormy13]

That old Socket A board has the VIA KT600 chipset on it, and looking at VIA's download site they don't have any Windows 7 drivers for it. That would explain why it is slow if 7 is using whatever limited drivers were provided to Microsoft (if any), or some generic drivers that are just enough to allow it to run.

that said there are Vista drivers for that chipset,

Drivers - Download

that should work. If they do, the performance should improve.