Why is my fast computer slow?

[wangel]

For the last 2 years I have used an Athalon 2.2 with 1 gig of RAM along with a 200 gig hard drive. I tweaked it over the years where it was responsive and fast. Well, last week I decided it was time to move up. I went to Best Buy and purchased their fastest computer, being a Gateway Athalon 4600 dual core, with 2 gigs, SATA 400 gigs, Nvidia 6100, etc. etc. I only added Office and a few utilities such as Nero and a few others. I find this computer slow, not responsive, and basically, 20% slower than my older computer? What will it take to get some speed out of this thing? Is it the Bios? XP? or what? What can make this thing go?

[Imperion1]

Prevent all those extra programs from running in the background and System Tray. Store bought computers generally run all kinds of programs upon boot up.
Without knowing which programs are running, its not entirely possible to tell you which ones to prevent from auto starting. But, anything doing with Gateway doesn't need to run.

[_Mystical_Night]

Usually Store baught pc's come with alot of stuff installed like isp offers, demo & trial software, system restore software, etc etc

most people that buy store baught pc's because they decided not to build one themselves usually format the pc completely and start from scratch when they get it out of the box to get rid of all that junk software

Edit: I also heard that gateway pc's come with services like remote assistance and remote registry enabled so they can help customers who call for tech support but it allows attackers to gain control of your pc as well very easily

[wangel]

OK, I took out four programs that Gateway had in there and left basically nothing. I also ran System Mechanic 6 that cleaned up the system, degragged, and took out some of the performance robbing things like fading menues etc. I still feel my older computer was more responsive and quicker in moving files and multi tasking. This one seems to have a delay, but all appears to be functioning fine. What am I missing? I'm running XP Media as my OS with XP Office 2003. I have not yet played with the BIOS, but is that the next step?

[Midknyte]

run msconfig and look at the startup items. uncheck unnecesary items.

http://www.sysinfo.org/startuplist.php

[DKJones96]

www.processlibrary.com

Can help you in your venture to close processes and prevent it from opening in the future.

[Rocketmech]

Check to see if the Indexing Services is enabled which could slow performance.

http://www.tweakxp.com/article37006.aspx

[GrefMofovich]

Uh I'm no wizard, but from the sound of it, the problem's either with your hard drive or the software (Windows). Are you perchance using the new Vista version of windows? If you have Win XP, I know a couple things you can do here.

Open up device manager (run "compmgmt.msc" from the Run menu, find device manager in the list)... You're interested in the items "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" and the "Disk Drives"... Under the IDE listing, find the primary IDE channel, open its Properties (right click) click advanced settings and make sure "Transfer Mode" is set to use DMA. DMA is a good thing... Under the Disk Drives item, find your hard drive, open its Properties and click the Policies tab. Your hard drive might be "optimized for quick removal" by default. Now unless you plan to rip your hd out of the case on a regular basis, you can go ahead and switch that to "optimize for performance".

If none of that helps, or if you in fact have windows vista, then I don't know, other than it shouldn't be slow in the least, and it's got nothing to do with fading menus. The next order of business would be to FORMAT the whole hard drive and start with a clean install of windows. Make sure you HAVE a means to boot up the machine and install windows, such as through the cd drive. Also, don't format away any precious personal data, for my sake! The reason this can be 100% effective while simply uninstalling retailer junk can be 1% effective is because all their reconfigurizing has probably twisted your Windows registry all inside-out, until only a clean install of the OS can right it. Why do they do it? I believe it's called sadism.

Good luck!

-GM