Hello Leander,

More information is needed. Questions that come to mind are which operating
system are you installing? Are you using Dell restore disks? How did you
"write zeros" to the hard drive? How was the drive formatted? Any other
relevant information would be helpful. It shouldn't take "several hours" to
install any operating system.

One obvious problem is insufficient memory. If it was a Dell restore no
doubt there are many programs and processes running that aren't needed and
can slow a system down to a crawl. Even with Windows 98, some of the
programs available today will be hard pressed to run with only 128 MB along
with everything else the system is doing. Running two or more only compounds
the problem. I recommend the maximum amount the system will take. Memory is
cheap and you can't have too much.

Sven Swanson, Sr.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Leander Haffner" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, September 09, 2004 10:31 PM
Subject: [PCBUILD] computer real slow


I am working on a dell computer pentium 4 1.6 mghtz with 128 mb of ram. The
computer stopped responing completly, so they brought it to me and I could
not get it to start even in safe mode. it would go so far and then say
windows is shutting down to prevent damage to your computer. I wrote zero's
to the hard drive and then reinstalled windows which took several hours.
what I mean is when it say 33 minutes remaining to load files it took
several hours instead of 33 minutes.Once I finally got windows loaded it is
just really slow, Like for something that should just take seconds take
sevearal minutes. what I mean is just clicking on the start menu and the
start menu should just pop up it takes several minutes for it to pop up and
then you click on control panel and it takes another several minutes to open
the control panel. Any help will be greatly appreciated as to what would
make this computer so slow. Thanks for any Help. Leander Haffner

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