Very slow PC

First job I looked at today was a HP Pavilion p6300uk (AMD Athlon II X2 215 / 3 gig DDR3 / Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit) nice PC but OMG so slow !, everything working but Windows would take ages to load, Task Manager said 50 processes RAM use was about normal, the p6300uk @ stock has 1 x 500GB HDD, plugged in Portable Apps Flash Drive and WOW ! the HDD was totally fragmented Defraggler - portable showed all red ! I saw two blue squares, obvious this HDD had never had a defrag. I downloaded Defraggler and set it to work about a hour later %34 done. I rang the owner and told him (you can pickup your PC this afternoon, and I have installed a small app to help your Hard Drives health).

This afternoon I will show the chap how to use and setup Defraggler, I think it goes to show how neglect can affect even a new-ish PC ... and its not the PCs or the OSs fault.

I can certainly agree if I am hearing you correctly. Most of my customer's issues are caused by the owner and not the OS or the machine. I try to educate my clients in maintaining their computer. Most of them think that all they have to do is press the power button and that's the extent of their involvement. With today's machines being 'always connected' monthly scans and maintenance is a must.

Roban wrote I could not agree more Roban, it was only a matter of days ago I had a chap telling me and one of my staff that he did not need the Anti virus application we suggested because he had a firewall ... ... and this chap is an accountant dealing with other peoples money !

In these days and times several things are essential to a smooth running computer system:

1. Enough RAM for the operating system, I tell my clients and friends a minimum of 2 GB if they're using Windows 7 or Vista, a minimum of 1 GB for XP systems.

2. A good effective AV and firewall program in addition to their router's NAT. In addition to running the AV scan on a regular scheduled basis.

3. An effective disk defragmenting program, either free or paid. The free ones I like are Auslogics Disk Defragmenter or Defraggler. The paid ones I like are PerfectDisk & O&O Defragmenter. I do not recommend Diskeeper at all due to several reasons.

4. A good file cleaning and trace erasing program such as CCleaner or Eraser.

If these four simple rules are followed, a nice smooth computer experience is assured.

Its a shame so many don't follow (sensible computing) Nibs, and we get the other end of the scale (3 firewalls and 2 or more AVs all running between stalls and crashes).

and this tale is nothing new. I got out of electronics in '85. Sometimes I think it was a mistake. lol But even before then 95% of the time the problem was operator error.