PC takes hour to load

[Ascetica]

My PC takes almost a hour to load. It is very slow and I am not able to get the reason behind the same. It was working fine before, but suddenly it started reacting slow. I cannot open application. The desktop takes a far more time to load. The right click appear after 15 min when clicked. After hitting Ctrl + Alt + Del I can see my cpu usage to highest. I have a antivirus but that too take quiet a long time to scan. There is very few space left in the hard drive. Does low space can create poor performance. I had installed nothing in the system in recent time.

[CoYoTeA]

Did you perform system restore. There can be virus in your system. It can due to this. Run system restore and get old settings back. It is the only way to get some quick fix. Or else formatting is another best alternative. Do you receive any kind of warning on the screen. If possible paste the same here. The error report can help you to get more troubleshooting options. Go to Event Viewer in the Control Panel and check for logs. There will be some error listed. Boot in safe mode if possible. If you are not sure about reading the log file you can visit Microsoft site for more details on the same.

[Patter-Son]

Boot in safe mode and remove some startup programs. There can be process which are eating your system resources. The most common one is Explorer.exe. Run Task Manager and then go Process. On that click on RAM and terminate the process which is eating maximum resource. I think your system has a serious virus infection. Even if your system resource is occupied if you are doing nothing, then there can be trojan. Second thing this kind of issue appear if your system processor heats up. You can find the same in BIOS. If the cpu is too hot change your heatsink and cpu fan.

[Janairo]

My system has a common problem here. It takes long time to boot, but once it is fully turned on I can work on the same. It is slow but still responsive. I had tried to boot my system is Safe Mode. In that I had disabled a number of services from the start up. It looks to be bit faster. Second thing that I tried is defragging the drive. defragmentation give a bit boost your system hard drive. If your system is too old I will advice you to downgrade your OS. I am using a very light edition of Linux on another old Celeron system. It works fine. And also there is no issue of virus here.

[FRIESEN]

Slow startup are common with those system which has lots of application configured on boot. That is the reason I always keep my startup empty. Click on Start > Run > Msconfig. In this go to Startup and disable all. There are your drivers also. If you can find them ignore the same. There is a small app called as Hijackthis. This application is capable of giving you a detailed log file by which you can simply find which application is causing what issue. To some extent this can be a hardware issue also. Poor response can be due to old processor or outdated ram. You need a better advice when you are going for a upgrade.

[SMichael]

There are number of third party cleaner which are better compared to other. If your system is working slow you can do nothing in that. System restore is only a temporary solution. There are some tips that I can provide you to make your system a bit faster on load, but I am not sure that it will help or not. If your pc was working fine before, then there can be some app or virus which has made your system slow. Try system restore once. Do that in Safe Mode. Or else the option that lies with you is going for the clean installation. Fresh installation will make your system better as there will be nothing installed. Only thing that you have to do is backup your system.

[LeonL]

Does disk cleanup help you. This are some regular practice which can be done atleast to make the system stable for sometime. Virus thing afterwards. How your system is working in Safe Mode. Is it working fine or still very slow. My old system just died in the same way. It was too slow at start. Later on I found the issue was with my drive which almost stopped working at the end. You can remove the ram stick and change the slot. Or if you are having multiple rams then check one by one which of them is causing by booting your system individually.

[Taidje]

My system has a bit different issue. I had some virus warning before. The antivirus is Avast. It showed that the virus is cleaned. So I ignored the warning. I am facing internet connection issue from last 4 weeks. So the antivirus remains almost uniupdated. The system is almost very slow. It is a Windows XP machine. It take a long time to open up My Computer. I had run Disk Cleanup which takes around an hour to finish. I think there was lots of file pending. There was a bit improvement after that. System restore does not help much. You can either do this thing which work for some time or simply format your system.

[GARTH]

My system behaves in odd way.The cpu usage sometime hikes a bit high and then goes down back to normal. The process keeps on going in the same way. So there is some files or application which is causing this. Later this morning I got a error on screen saying to close some file. It was in the dump file. Till yet the system is working fine. I think new updates might have cause this.

[Abdulmajid]

First of it is better if you can mention the exact errors. As it is the only way by which you can find the right option to get rid of issue. There can be hardware and software fault. But a error gives you the right option to deal with the issue. Event Viewer is the only place where you can locate the logs to find the right error information. For bluescreen mostly the pc reboots on crash. You can disable automatic restart to find the error details. Proper error reports offer you better way of troubleshooting the issue of your system.

[Toby-Martin]

System are slowed down due to number of reasons. There are some quick ways that can make it work properly. Like you can start with Defragmentation. It is will arrange the data properly so that the drive can read the same a bit faster. Disk Cleanup provides you a basic option by getting rid of old files from the system. Along with that using Registry cleaner is another thing which is needed. There can be virus infection also. But if that is found then simply format your system. Do not wait for this small fixes. They are not going to help much. You can run a Windows Repair setup if you want to keep old applications.

[EltonJ]

My system showed up a error related to some faulty application. I had installed some tweak too recently. The error appeared frequently now. I had removed that software but still sometime when I boot the error is on the screen. I am having a router connected to the system. The application helps to tweak settings of the router. The error does not appear if the router is turned off. There is not problem with the connectivity or net surfing. I had updated fresh drivers also. In device manager there is one hardware listed as unknown and has exclamation mark on it. How can I find that it is not proper.

[Han$naH]

Just re-install your router. There can be some things which are not well installed. If the router you have has a modem inside it, then you will need to re-install the drivers. With each of those device we normally receive a driver disc. You can use that to run the setup. If you do not have the disk you can download the same from official website. There are proper drivers available. On that unknown device right click and choose on update drivers. Follow the screen instructions.

[Illeana]

I always keep a image disc with me. It helps me to restore my system in case of such problem. Because instead of wasting time for making those small changes it is much better to restore the system with system image. That works in more better way. It also consume less time and your system is ready to work. Another thing when you add any application check the system requirement. Because poor system requirement make it work slow. I found this at the time of OS upgrade.

[Diggs]

I am having a Windows XP system. My system takes a long time to respond. Like if I open a Word file it takes too much time to start. The same happens for Excel and even paint brush. I had preform disk defragmentation which showed up some bad sectors in the system drive. I have one more drive attached. I a thinking to shift the os on that and keeping this one as extra storage space. But still I am a bit doubtful about Windows XP. This time going for Vista I think is much better. I have 512MB ram and a Dual Core system. Does it will work fine.