Computer Failing?

[RedDart]

My 3.5 year old Dell Dimension (Celeron D processor running XP with 512K RAM) has been running much slower in the last month or so, mainly while running the e-mail client and surfing the Internet. Office applications seem to run OK. The computer freezes up, has locked up and once I received the BSOD. After the reboot from the BSOD, I was told the the file system "was dirty" (never saw that message before). When I run Windows task manager, the CPU useage goes from 100% to sometimes 0% in the course of a few seconds. In the last several days the fans are running at full speed and last night the hard disk temperature was a toasty 99 degrees F. Kaspersky Internet Security has not found any viruses, malware, etc.

Any ideas what is causing these problems? Is this computer on the way out? Would it be worth having it diagnosed by a professional or just bite the bullet and get a new machine? Any comments or help is appreciated.

 

[saberz]

Death by dust.

Buy a can of compressed air and open your pc. Most of the Dell's and other manufacturers used big huge heatsinks with fans built into the front of the chassis. You probably have 1/2 inch of dust settled in there.

Blow out all the dust in the casing. Secondly, the thermal tape/paste may start to be drying out, but chances are its the dust first and foremost if you have never done it before.

 

[Deltona_Dave]

If you have an air compressor, take the case out in the shop, take the side cover off, and blow it out good. If not, by some canned air (wally, office depot, etc).

Download Piriform's CCleaner and run it. It will clean out junk files, clean the registry, etc. It is free and you can download it from majorgeeks.com Also download Piriforms defraggler. it will straighten out the files much better than MS'defragmenter.

Dave

 

[Chris Meutsch]

512k ram?! Get more memory in that bad boy while you are de-funking it with compressed air.

 

[jhMalibu]

99F for a hard drive is fine. Anything under 50C is okay in my books.

And you're running a 3.5 yr old install of XP. Let's face it, XP gets crufty on old installs. Best bet is a reinstall of the OS, but that is usually a huge pain with apps and data.

And more memory is a good thing. But you might be on DDR, which can get kind of pricey these days.

 

[Deltona_Dave]

Red Dart, if you need memory DDR2. I have a Gig of PC2 (ddr2) 4200 that I can send you. PM me and I will send it out USPS.

I am always salvaging RAM and HDD's from dead PC's.

Dave

 

[Carbon]

Cleaning. More RAM. Good.

Make sure you have a gig or more of free space on the drive. Run the following command:

chkdsk C: /F

You will need to reboot to let this run.

Also defragment your drive.

 

[Cutehumor]

my wife told me she was having the same problem last week with her computer fan on all the time and her computer was slow. I ran tune up utilities on her Windows XP. found 211 registry errors!! she didn't defrag the hard drive in years either. cleaned up the pc pretty good and now it's back to normal.

 

[Deltona_Dave]

Originally Posted By: Carbon
Cleaning. More RAM. Good.

Make sure you have a gig or more of free space on the drive. Run the following command:

chkdsk C: /F

You will need to reboot to let this run.

Also defragment your drive.


Chkdsk c: /r works better. It will repair any bad sectors or re-allocate them. Just go to Start -> Run -> type in "cmd" no quotes, press enter, type in checkdsk c: /r It will say to restart. type exit, then reboot.

Dave

 

[greenaccord02]

Just blow the dust out first. I think your processor is throttling to lower it's temperature which would account for the spikes to 100% and other issues.

A cleanup of files would be a good practice, but not before you blow it out and back everything worthwhile up.

 

[RedDart]

Thanks guys for all your suggestions. I blew the dust out 2 months ago and removed and reseated the memory sticks to make sure they were making good contact. The son of a friend of mine is a tech with the Geek Squad and he ran 2 scan programs. The short one included a registry mechanic program. The only issue found was that Kaspersky had missed an adware program but the program is not dangerous. The longer scan which ran all night ran 26 hardware tests and all were passed. The fan speed is still ramped up but it has been unseasonably warm here. There is no noises that would indicate that the fan is failing. Computer is running much quicker but I guess more RAM is needed. Since it is DDR SDRAM (DDR400/PC3200) it is a bit pricey per 1 GB stick. Should I upgrade to 1 GB or 2 GB, which is the maximum the machine will support?

 

[StormRider]

Max it out to 2GB if you can. Tiger direct has a 2gb memory pack (PNY) of PC3200 DDR for 68 bucks (2 1GB sticks) + shipping. If you spend more than $100 you get free shipping, so if you need other computer stuff it would be a good time to get some..

 

[jocomo]

FWIW. I've got a dell dimension with the pentium processor. I upgraded to 2GB. I went through Dell's phone support and was informed 2GB was the max for the computer. When the tech quoted the price for the dell ram I told him it sounded too expensive I would shop around. Not wanting to lose a sale he told me he could sell me the same thing under a different manuf. for a little more than half the price as I remember. I originally had two 256k sticks installed and couldn't use them in the upgrade. Had to go with 2 1GB sticks so the ram originally installed in the computer became useless. I did experience a noticeable difference in the performance of the computer however.

 

[SLCraig]

You could also put a Core 2 Duo processor in that mainboard if the Celeron-D is an LGA775 CPU. Some Googling will tell you if that'll work or not. I just bought a C2D for my laptop off the classifieds to replace the standard Core Duo CPU (Pentium dual core mobile essentially) Should make a nice jump in performance.

 

[JustinH]

Put the latest version of Ubuntu linux on it instaed of windows, that will speed it up a ton.

It comes with all the office/internet apps that you need, and you don't need to worry about antivirus apps slowing you down.

 

[ahoier]

Originally Posted By: RedDart
My 3.5 year old Dell Dimension (Celeron D processor running XP with 512K RAM) has been running much slower in the last month or so, mainly while running the e-mail client and surfing the Internet. Office applications seem to run OK. The computer freezes up, has locked up and once I received the BSOD. After the reboot from the BSOD, I was told the the file system "was dirty" (never saw that message before). When I run Windows task manager, the CPU useage goes from 100% to sometimes 0% in the course of a few seconds. In the last several days the fans are running at full speed and last night the hard disk temperature was a toasty 99 degrees F. Kaspersky Internet Security has not found any viruses, malware, etc.

Any ideas what is causing these problems? Is this computer on the way out? Would it be worth having it diagnosed by a professional or just bite the bullet and get a new machine? Any comments or help is appreciated.
I've seen a lot of dust bunnies kill computers.

particularly if you don't dust, or don't run your A/C unit (which contains a dust-filtering agent in most instances), etc...

I'd check that out. I know my father (lives in CA) was having problems with his desktop (emachines from walmart lol), I opened up the case, and I was surprised the PC still ran.....there was dust bunnies alll over the cords, wires, cables, etc...so we got out his air compressor and blew the dust out of it.

Other than that, check the HDD capacity, if you are lacking free space, Windows will have to "search longer" for space to drop new files......so you may try uninstalling apps you no longer use.

After that, try a disk cleanup (Start > Accessoring > System Tools) and let that clean everything out.

Then, time for the defragmentation. Same place, Start > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmentation and let that run and defrag your system.


ccleaner.com has a great app for cleaning up "junk" files too, might give that a try.