BleepingComputer.com: Slow Computer And Other Woes

I have a top of the line Dell computer running Windows XP. The computer is about a year and a half old. I originally thought I was having problems when my northbridge chipset was reading 70 to 78 degrees (celcius). I believe this is very hot, but the Dell representives assure me that this is well within a safe operating temp -(but I have serious doubts). My problems were many.

Finally the motherboard was replaced, but now my systems is operating as slow as a crippled horse making its way through a muddy swamp.

I have defragmented, checked for enough RAM and am 100% positive that spyware, viruses or a poor firewall are NOT the problem. There have been questions about possible bad sectors on the hard drive, but recent test show that to not be the case. The 500 GB hard drive is about 40% full. Could it be the CPU? Could it be the Windows programs itself?

My service people seem to have a great deal of difficulty in solving this problem.

Another clue may be found in this example. Six months ago I could burn a DVD of two hours of family videos in about 35 minutes -(and work on a Word document at the same time.) Burning that same exact DVD today takes about a hour and ten minutes. Opening up Word during this process is about 7 minute process, and working on it at the same time usually causes the system to freeze up.

I'd greatly appreaciate any possible solutions as well as any advice on how to POSITIVELY get help through Dell's Service people. Many thanks from a very frustrated guy.

For some reason, It seems like computers just slow down as they get older. Maybe its the hard drive. I still can't seem to get things to work as fast even after using a destructive restore(reformat and reinstallation from HD partition)

Computers just seem to get slower as they get older. I don't think there's a lot you can do about it.

Are you still getting high temperatures after changing the motherboard? When you changed it, did you reinstall Windows?
What are your computer specs exactly?

I would backup your data and reinstall Windows.

You can run a test of the hard drive by downloading a free program from the website of the hard drive manufacturer - this will tell you if the drive is going bad or not.

Try checking Device Manager (Start...Run...type in "devmgmt.msc" (without the quotes) and press Enter) to see if there's any problems there. Let us know and we'll move on from there.

As long as your not asking the computer to do more then you originally did when you bought it (slim chance of that happening) the computer shouldn't slow down unless components wear out. With loading and unloading programs using new software and asking more and more from the computer is what makes them too slow and obsolete.

When you installed the new motherboard did you use new thermal past on the CPU? Did you put the memory in the same place in the new board? Did one of the modules get damaged in the swap? If the motherboard is different at all from the old one a re-install of windows may help.