Windows XP too slow on a fast machine. (1 Viewer)

Hi,

I´ve started to use XP and everything is taking forever.

Do you know of any tricks to make it comparable to older versions, like windows 98?

If I have automated some actions in excel or word, is there a way to tell access XP to start word/excel 97 in stead of word/excel XP?

Fuga.

Where to start !

First things first, what's your system spec ? XP can run on a 300mhz machine with 128 meg of RAM but you would have to turn a lot of features down for it to run smoothly.

Firstly turn off any unwanted 'visual tweeks', here is a good guide. You could simply switch to Windows classical view - right click on Start > properties and select Classical start menu.
Remove any unwanted programmes from all your startup folders - C:\Documents and Settings\xxx\Start Menu\Programs, where xxx = Administrator, All Users, default user and your login folders.
Ensure you are not running any unwanted apps - check in task manager (Google those you are not sure about) and check the application has "Run on startup" disabled

***IMPORTANT*** - Stop any unwanted and potentially insecure services, here is a good guide.

Now your second question is a little confusing - do you have both Office 97 and XP installed ? If so you'll run into troubles

What anti-virus software are you running. Norton can drag some systems.

Thank you for your replies!

Yes, I know about the classical view, and that helps some.

I have a laptop, 2.8 Ghz p4, 512 ram and 60 Gb hdd. I have both office installed, and that has given me a lot of trouble with references and so on in the past. When I´ve used word97, wordXP needs to run some installation before I can use it. Both offices works fine, though. Only XP is too slow. In fact 97 is too slow to. I really can´t say that this computer is that much faster than my old one (300 mhz p2, 96 ram, 4 GB) which ran on windows 98.

As for the anti-virus: I do use norton, and I know it slows down the computer, but I think it was slow even before that. However this is the main reason I would like to be able to automate opening word/excel 97 since word/excel XP performs a viral scan before opening a document.

(My system downloads some html, edits it in word, edits it in excel before importing it to access. This process actually takes a lot longer with the new computer.)

If you have any more ideas (maybe a better anti-virus), please let me know. And I´ll check out the links in your reply.


Thanks


Fuga.

Ahh our old friend Norton Have you disabled the office plugin under misc in Norton ? That could be the cause.

One of the best anti-virus software around is AVG and it's free . If your going to unistall Norton make sure you completely remove it - either manually (inluding registry entries) or you could use this.

I really would advise you to only use one version of Office, is there any reason you need 2 different versions ? If it's for compatability purposes you can save as excel 97 file for example.

thanks again!

I will try the AVG software. The reason I have two office is that I started creating my little system in A97. But also, when running through a few hundred text files in word, word97 takes about half the time to finish (even without norton).

Fuga.

Norton NIS is a nightmare. I uninstalled this on my XP machine and the world was a much happier place. Norton AV 2002 works just fine with no performance hit.