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Okay, I'm posting on behalf of my irrate mother. We've recently bought a computer for the downstairs to fill the space that would have been the Mac's position (Mam damn near cast the thing out the window. Safe to say, she isn't fond of it). Now, we've been struggling with some severe performance issues and I would like a bit of help to try and identify whats wrong with it. It takes about 5 minutes to load win7, then a further 10-15 minutes once it's logged in before any program becomes usable because it simply hangs and freezes when loading. It should perform fine, its an Intel i5 2.8ghz quad but yet it doesn't. The problem is exacerbated when you put a program like Nero or a IM program on, and it slows to the point of being unusable.

I've done a performance evaluation and came up with the following:


it's clear that the graphics card is a significant lower spec item than the others but surely that won't affect every day performance of win7. We're running 64 bit by the way.

Have you slaughtered a chicken and said the incantations exactly the way you were instructed?

Did you chant "For the Emperor" before hitting each key?

Try doing a system restore, if that doesn't work let me know.

We've done 2 of them now.

Ok, well thats odd... Hmm... idk what to say, it's hard to do remote assistance without seeing it. Which I could do if you can't figure it out with normal troubleshooting.

Meh. I still say you need to consult the Necronomicon and try a few spells.

Does it have enough RAM?

It has 4GB of RAM, more than enough.

The two scores that seem a little iffy where the graphics card, which achieved a windows index thing of 4.9 and the hard drive transfer rate which was 5.0. We're looking into replacing the graphics card, but I can't see that making a massive difference in every day operation.

Don't replace the graphics card, the only way you'll get higher than that is with a $200+ graphics card, that windows score means almost nothing, I'm not sure why they gauge the hard drive speed and graphics card on the same scale, it's stupid. If it's running really slow it may be a bad component. Have you run a dskchk on it?

Yeah, a 4.9 isn't that low, and it's perfectly fine unless you're really looking to do serious gaming on it.

I'm gonna try a defrag at did point and if I can work out how to do the diskcheck then I'll run that.

If you can't get on one of your IM clients and get in touch with me so I can get set up a remote setup so that I can try and fix it if you can't.

I really doubt your disk is THAT fragmented. Win7 on an up to date computer should be able to be up and running in three minutes, five tops. I'd really look at what processes are coming up with start up. Can't rule out a virus sadly. The only time I've had performance drops that severe was with a virus which was loading up tons of things on start up.