ok im gonna try to be brief but i doubt it... So i have this HP desktop pc, 3 gigs ram, 250 gb hard drive, amd athlon (or turion im not sure) 64 X2 dual core processor, nvidia gefore 7500 LE graphics card, basically a pretty nice desktop. The problem is that this desktop was extremely fast, running windows vista home premium, until my sister used it once and i have no idea what she did to it but its like she killed it. Its performing very slow now, response time is very delayed, so i figured ill reformat it and it'll be good as new, but after reformatting it, its still running slow. Im out of ideas as to what to do. any help is appreciated thanks.
something that will slow down a computer is antispyware software. Do you have that installed?. Also your video card is kind of weak for using vista. Vista requires a little more power. You can try and disable the "aero" setting on vista and see if that speeds you up. Also it wouldn't hurt to update your video card drivers. If your hard drive is IDE, make sure it's setup as DMA and not PIO.
Oh yes, formatting is a beautiful thing.. I use to do it all the time to an older Computer I had (what a POS that was) but sometimes I had to remove all the ram except one, boot it up, turn it off again, than put the other chips of ram in than it worked.. Your bios might not be reconizing the ram which would cause extreme slow performance with alot of things.. Also VISTA is quite a performance hogger as the other man said, disable AERO it's a key performance thief. Try upgrading to Windows 7 you'll find the slowest of computers with vista run decently well using 7. SO yeah, RAM is your best bet, or anti-spyware stuff... Could be many other alternatives try the ram trick and buddy's recommendations. Your processor could also be dying, I had an AMD ATHLON XP that randomly fried for absolutely no reason before.
ok so let me see, i just reformatted the machine and its free of any and all antispyware software. and now i gotta worry about a new graphics card, and maybe new processors >.> but i dont know how to find out if my hard drive is IDE, and how to set it up as DMA or PIO. and i will try the ram trick thing. (just as a note though, i checked my "system" folder, and it says i have 3gb of ram, so that means its recognizing them right?) well anyway, any help with the hard drive issue (IDE) would be helpful =D