BleepingComputer.com: Slow startup - benchmark speeds for startup

I've inherited a 5 year old laptop from a colleague and it is painfully slow.
Before I waste too much time on it, I'd really like to get some sort of benchmark for what a reasonable boot time is.
It takes 7 minutes from hitting the power switch through startup to being able to get any response from the desktop.

Just to complicate things, when I originally received the laptop is was carrying the "Security Tool" malware.
I'm reasonably confident this has now been fully removed - AVG, Malwarebytes and Spybot all do full checks with no faults now.

The OS is Windows XP Professional.
The laptop is a DELL Inspiron 630M (I'm guessing around 5 years old)
248MB RAM
Intel Pentium M 1.73GHz
37GB hard drive with about 6GB space.

Currently it takes 3 minutes 30 seconds to get to the Ctrl/Alt/Del screen;
Another minute to the desktop.
Then another 2 minutes till the taskbar appears and the Start button responds to a click.
When you close a window it takes a while and the background takes several seconds to redraw.
Generally, all activity on the laptop is very slow - just opening the control panel takes the best part of a minute.

Without spending money on more RAM or other hardware, is it fair to expect this laptop to perform better?

Quote

with those limited resources
I would recommend that you install a light weight linux distro (LXDE Desktop or XFCE Desktop)

That would likely speed up your computer

This post has been edited by Ramchu: 12 October 2010 - 06:25 AM

Thanks for the suggestion.

I know that by today's standards the spec is not too hot.
Even so, at point of purchase it did at least operate in a reasonable fashion.

I was hoping to get the laptop into a reasonable state then pass it on to a family member who's elderly and easily confused.
XP is what they're used to and I'd rather not blow their mind with a different OS!

Perhaps I'm fooling myself by thinking that I could get it back to a user-friendly state without too much pain.
I'll try seeing how much I can safely uninstall / disable / defrag - if all else fails might go down the Linux route.

If I am reading your original post correctly - one of the problems is that you only have 6 gig of free space

Also do not under estimate this family member
The Linux desktop is no harder to use - plus you do not have to mess with antivirus software (not to say that security is to be completely ignored )and load the system down with additional resource hogging ad on programs.

What will this person be using the computer for ?
web access - e-mail - possibly watching some online videos - viewing some saved family pics ?

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Ramchu, on Oct 12 2010, 12:58 PM, said:

Without doing a total character assasination of the person in question (!) lets just say any change to their idea of the norm would not go down well.
the 6GB free space is in part due to about 10GB of MS Outlook pst files which I need to hang onto for the short term.

You need way more RAM then 256Megs.

If you upgrade the ram to 1 gig it would be able to run XP reasonably well. Used 1gb sticks are running about $15-20 right now on ebay.

This post has been edited by Gabrial: 12 October 2010 - 09:44 PM