Extremely Slow Dell Dimension 2400

[DOD]

Hello all,

I hope someone can help me out. I bought a Dell Dimension 2400 from someone and figured I would get a second Desktop unit up and running. I got it home and found it ran extremely slowly so I re-installed XP Home, no improvement. Then I installed XP Pro on another partition, still no luck, still extremely slow.

I have tried running Reg Cure and every time I run it, it comes up with problems, I fix them still have problems if I run it again. The CPU is at 100% all the time. Is this thing just a paperweight or is it salvageable?

You help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance
DOD

 

[seedubya]

What's the entire spec?

 

[NYJimbo]

Hello all,

I hope someone can help me out. I bought a Dell Dimension 2400 from someone and figured I would get a second Desktop unit up and running. I got it home and found it ran extremely slowly so I re-installed XP Home, no improvement. Then I installed XP Pro on another partition, still no luck, still extremely slow.

I have tried running Reg Cure and every time I run it, it comes up with problems, I fix them still have problems if I run it again. The CPU is at 100% all the time. Is this thing just a paperweight or is it salvageable?

You help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance
DOD

Without knowing anything more I would say you dont have enough ram.

 

[DOD]

Not sure what you mean, but it has 700+ RAM, 40 gig HD, other than that I assume it is as purchased. I bought it from a friend, I don't believe it had been used in a couple of years. Date on HD is 2004

 

[NYJimbo]

Not sure what you mean, but it has 700+ RAM, 40 gig HD, other than that I assume it is as purchased. I bought it from a friend, I don't believe it had been used in a couple of years. Date on HD is 2004

Just to be sure, you mean 700+ megs ram, can you check to be sure?. Thats kind of an odd number unless they did a 256+512 chip combo or something.

 

[gunslinger]

Just going by what you have said, I would say either you don't have enough RAM or your HDD is about to fail. You might also want to check you drive speed. If it was a replacement hard drive it could be a 5400 RPM or slower drive and that would make a difference.

 

[NYJimbo]

Did you do a reformat and reinstall or reinstall to an existing Windows install ?.

I think this machine should be scanned with Spybot, preferably in safe mode. . It cant hurt, spybot is a fantastic program and the worst it can do is confirm that nothing bad is in the machine.

I just dont see the box running at 100% unless something is running, even a bad hd shouldnt cause it because if the machine is idle then little or no disk i/o should be happening. It could be indexing since it's a new machine, but that should end at some point.

If you could post some of the errors you came up with we might be able to see a trend or something.

Dell puts some decent info on this box:

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim2400/en/sm_en/specs.htm

It should at least run well at idle, providing it has enough ram. So I do suspect something like a virus.

 

[Simmy]

can you run HDTune and let us know what speed you're getting. Also check in Device Manager that the drive is running in DMA mode 5. If it's not, you could try replacing the IDE cable and reinstall the Primary IDE Channel in Device Manager.

 

[DOD]

I finally got a Anti Virus program running and it found nothing. Will run HDTune and post the results


Device Manager info from system

"DMA if Available"
"Ultra DMA Mode 5"

The system originally had 256 Meg Ram, I put in another 512 from another system (which isn't working either), it recognized the additional memory and now shows 762 or 764 Meg.

When I reinstalled the Operating system I formatted the drive

 

[Simmy]

Download HDTune from here

 

[DOD]

HD Tune info:


Benchmark Test

Transfer Rate:

Min - 3.5MB/sec​

Max - 35.2MB/sec​

Avg - 31.6MB/sec​

Access Time - 22.5 ms

Burst Rate - 24.0MB/sec

CPU Usage - 56.9%

Health all shows OK

 

[Simmy]

56.9% CPU Usage is a bit odd :\ Those transfer/burst rates are on the low side but that could be about right for a machine of that age. I would try replacing the IDE cable and running the hard drive in the secondary IDE slot on the motherboard. If that doesn't change anything then I would look to replace the hard drive if you have a spare one floating about - or run the hard drive diagnostics on UBCD.

What are you using to install windows? Is it a genuine installation/recovery CD or one you downloaded? Have you installed the right chipset drivers from the Dell website?

In task manager, how many processes are you running and what is the "Commit Charge (K) Total" and "Physical Memory (K) Total" in the performance tab.

 

[DOD]

Simmy,

It is an original XP CD.

The Commit Charge is 195872 total, 2281288 Limit, 215000 Peak

Physical Memory Total is 777216, Available 593920, System Cache 256744

Number of processes is 26

 

[Wheelie]

The Dell 2400 is a VERY POOR performer even when it is running it's best. It has a really crappy motherboard. I don't care how much RAM you add or what CPU it has it will run poorly. I own one and it is sitting in the corner not hooked up it is such a piece of junk. Nearly useless.

However, you said you have 100% CPU so you may have one of two or three issues:
1) Sometimes Windows Automatic Updates turns on and runs for several hours at 100% CPU then it stops. I do not know why it does that but I have seen it a billion times. Just leave it hooked to the Internet and walk away for a few hours. If wuauclt is jumping around near the top (sort the task mgr by CPU usage) its probably the reason.
2) The anti virus is conflicting with something. Remove it and see if that fixes it
3) A driver is conflicting or is bad.

The best thing to do in this situation is to run msconfig and turn all the unnecessary stuff off and then sort the task manager CPU column so the most active processes are at the top (click it twice) and see what's running the most and work on them. In other wrods: what the heck is running all the time?