Slow Dell Dimension P4 computers

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htpc_user

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jun 27, 2008
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OK, I can't take any more. Where I work we have several Dell Dimension computers. They are around the "2400" series. They have Pentium 4 cpu's, 256mb RAM, running Windows XP. All are horribly slow. They are slower than anything I've ever seen. I work and tinker on computers all the time, and I own 6. I've never seen any computers run this slow. We also have older Dell Optiplex PC's with Pentium II 400mhz and 350 mhz cpu's and 64mb of RAM, and these computers actually run better than the Dimensions. My computer here at work is an HP Pavilion 505w that has a Celeron cpu (2.2 ghz) and 256mb of RAM; even though it's not the fastest thing in the world, it sure beats the Pentium 4 computers that we have. It can't be that the computers are "bogged down" with a lot of software 'cause they've been this way since 1st set up. Our resident computer "expert" blames Windows XP, but I've ran XP at home on an 850 mhz Thunderbird cpu and a 550 mhz Pentium III and neither were as slow as these things. Any ideas on what the heck is wrong? Is Dell just that much crap?
 
Let's just say the 2400s were crap when they were released and leave it at that.

If you want them to be "faster" upgrade the RAM to 1GB (absolute minimum for XP in my opinion), go into the BIOS and see if you can change the HDD setting to "performance", enable HT if the CPU supports it, defrag the hard drive with JKDefrag, and update the BIOS.

If you enable HT, you will most likely need to run a script to update the HAL to the multithreaded one.

http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/updating-the-hal-for-multiprocessor-support-vt70331.html?highlight=

shows you how to do that. This is one of the first things I do on any DELL P4 system that came from the factory with HT turned off.

If you have a space PCI video card laying around, installing it will help also as the 2400s have onboard video and do not have an AGP slot.

You may also want to disable software XD by editing the boot.ini file. Change optin=yes (or is it on?) to optin=AlwaysOff.

Change the pagefile to a static size instead of the default setting. 2x the amount of RAM that is installed in the system is a good start.
 
- It could be a slow hard drive
- Have you done a reformat yet on those systems?
 
Yeah Dell has come a long way in the last few years. There PCs in my experiences are of much better quality than they used to be. We had a few 2400s and yeah they are just slow. A RAM upgrade will help. 256 for todays OSs and apps just doesn't cut it. Sometimes I have found that running a check disk seems to help boot times a little on some of those older hard drives (not always though). I would check Dells site for Driver updates as well. An updated chipset driver could help.
 
Heh, I'm about 8mo away from upgrading the rest of the DIM2400's at my company (I think we have about half a dozen left). Yes, they're VERY slow. My P4 2.4Ghz at home outperforms these 2.8Ghz Dimensions, even after a fresh reformat/reinstall and 1GB DDR333 upgrade. You can get Vostro 220's for under $500 w/ monitor these days, so an upgrade is rather cheap. ;)
 
I have 2 machines just like this that started acting slow over the past week or so.

1 had 256 mb of RAM and the other had 512mb... I literally just ordered each one a GB of RAM each for $42 (each) on crucial.com.

should be in by monday hopefully.
 
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