Hey Computer Gurus!

J

jml1911a1

NAXJA Forum User
Location
Chambersburg, PA
I have a Dell Dimension w/ Intel Celeron and WinME, bought new 3 years ago, upgraded to 256K RAM. Windows/IE/MS Money are all flakey; frequent error messages, instability, generally slow performance (I know, I know, what do I expect from Celeron, but it's alot slower than before.

I've done Norton Anti-Virus scans, Spybot, AdAware, and two other AV scans. I get the feeling it's a Windows problem, but after 2 fdisk/reinstalls, I still have the same issues. Could it be a hardware problem? Power supply? HD?

I do fairly well at diagnosing my own ills, but this has gone on for a couple of months, and I'm stumped.

Thanks in advance!

Jeff
 
jeff talk to glenn or remi, they're kinda the resident pc experts in my opinion:D
 
jml1911a1 said:
I have a Dell Dimension w/ Intel Celeron and WinME, bought new 3 years ago, upgraded to 256K RAM. Windows/IE/MS Money are all flakey; frequent error messages, instability, generally slow performance (I know, I know, what do I expect from Celeron, but it's alot slower than before.

I've done Norton Anti-Virus scans, Spybot, AdAware, and two other AV scans. I get the feeling it's a Windows problem, but after 2 fdisk/reinstalls, I still have the same issues. Could it be a hardware problem? Power supply? HD?

I do fairly well at diagnosing my own ills, but this has gone on for a couple of months, and I'm stumped.

Thanks in advance!

Jeff
Click to expand...


How long since it has had a pave over ?? 98ME is flakey at best, 98SE is more stable if going backwards but is not a good move, best overall solution is to upgrade to win2k. The other thing you might want to consider is upgrading to a real pentium processor if your MB will take it, dell and gateway use alot of 'specialty boards' that they get cheap and are are not upgradeable, planned obsolescence. I design and build systems for a living and celerons leave alot to be desired I avoid spec'ing them at all costs but then most of my customers do more than word and IE so it rarely becomes an issue. A third alternative if money is a factor is to download Linux Mandrake 10 [free], burn the three cd's and pave the system over, it will run 2x as fast as windows and has all the stuff you normally need, OpenOffice, browsers, graphics editors, pretty much everything.
If the problem started after the memory change pull one out, alot of times there are compatability issues between ram manfacturers and even between lots, I am assuming you have 2 128 sticks in there, try with each one alone.If you have 2 64's and a 128 that will cause problems. Mixing 100 and 133's will also increase any issues between manufacturer and lot.
How long since you have cleaned the thing out, can of canned air in one hand and a vac in the other including the power supply ??
If the PS is bad you are kind of stuck with dell, they make proprietary boxes that only fit their powersupplys [intentional] but you can unplug the one in the case and plug an external one in on the bench just to check.
 
jml1911a1 said:
I have a Dell Dimension w/ Intel Celeron and WinME, bought new 3 years ago, upgraded to 256K RAM. Windows/IE/MS Money are all flakey; frequent error messages, instability, generally slow performance (I know, I know, what do I expect from Celeron, but it's alot slower than before.

I've done Norton Anti-Virus scans, Spybot, AdAware, and two other AV scans. I get the feeling it's a Windows problem, but after 2 fdisk/reinstalls, I still have the same issues. Could it be a hardware problem? Power supply? HD?

I do fairly well at diagnosing my own ills, but this has gone on for a couple of months, and I'm stumped.

Thanks in advance!

Jeff
Click to expand...

Hmm you say you did reinstalls. I personally do not like ME as I have seen many bad things come for the 9x line to which it belongs.

For starters: can you be a bit more specific on the error messages? Also is the computer stand alone or is it plugged into a hub where it interacts with other computers? Reason for that question is that if one of those machines has a virus or worm that uses network as the infection medium before you get a chance to install AV and run the updates on it you will already be infected.

Another thing to look at is the hard drive: I had my hard drive slowly start failing on me and then go out. The best indication I had was that it switched out to PIO mode from DMA (to check for that go to device manager, find the primary channel, go into it's properties and then one of the tabs will show the mode the drive is running at: one of DMA ones or PIO. If PIO I'd suspect the drive). Another thing to try is that if you're plugged into the network when you install windows is to actually install without being plugged into the network and then let it run for a short while and see how it feels. Also which drivers did you use? MS provided or did you go to the support page on dell's website and get your specific drivers? You might want to check also the procedure for reinstalling OS on your specific machine as there might be a driver that needs to be installed before anything else (when I reinstalled win2k on my i8000 I had to load a specific driver from Dell before anything else as win2k didn't have that driver in it till sp1).

Hope this helps and feel free to post with questions.
Btw when you go onto the support page for dell look for dell talk. It's got great forum for tech support: it's primarily user driven and 90% of those people know their specific machines better then dell techs.
 
MalakaiKingston said:
might need to U/G bios
Click to expand...
I would recommend not touching it till the original problem gets solved as it worked with the current bios and now it's not working. If bios gets changed and problems keep continuing there is no way of knowing if the problem is the old one or new one.
 
Hello,

I have to agree to Kejtar. Do not upgrade your BIOS by now.
Remember what happend at the time the system got slow. Maybe you did an Windows Update? I do have a lot of problems with that.
My system was installed with the newest drivers for all the components. After I did an Windows Update the system got hanging (better to call it sleeping, because it wasn't really dead). After I deleted all the drivers the problem of the hanging system has gone. But now the system is slow.

Try to do the following steps:
If you changed hardware - rearrange to the origin
If possible format the disk with a low-level-format
Reinstall the system
Test the speed
Install the drivers of your components (grafik-card; ...)
Test the speed

greetings from Austria
Rainer
 
:gonnablow Being a moron, I mixed PC100 RAM with PC133. I no longer have the right to breathe.

I shall now go take a bath, and take my monitor into the tub with me. <sigh...>



:D Thanks for all the help, I'm not sure if this fixed it, but it can't hurt.

I do realize that ME/Celeron is an ugly combination, much like microwaves and gerbils, but it's what I have. I do have a new laptop w/ Pentium and XP that emptied the gun fund, but it's not giving me too much trouble (yet). I have tinkered with the idea of Linux on the laptop, but not sure if I'm ready to tackle that yet--might do a partition and dual-boot configuration, or just put Linux on the desktop.

This computer is on a home network here, with both computers religiously scanned for viruses and spyware quite regularly (2x/week).

Thanks again, everyone!
 
Last edited:
Kejtar

I checked Device Manager, and though I'm not quite sure what you meant by the "primary channel", I checked under the properties for the hard drive, and a checkbox for DMA was unchecked. I checked it, restarted, and green smoke eminated from my toilet, and Bill Gates came up on the monitor and told me not to do that.

Just kidding. I restarted, and everything works. I don't know if that fixed it, but we'll see after a few days of usage.

Thanks!

jml1911a1
 
Glad the memory was the issue. IMO Windows 2000 Pro with the serv packs would be a much better OS for you.... much more stable and makes better use of the RAM that you do have. I have used W2k Pro on an AMD k6-2 500 that I built 4 years ago. Initially with 128 Megs of ram and later I upgraded to 384 (added 256 to max out my poor FIC VA-503+ board) and it is stable, reliable and decent performance for everything I do.

Oh yeah... stick Linux on the Celery.... :dunno:

Good luck! :geek: :repair:

Travis
 
fwiw, win98,95 and (gag) me seem to function well at 128mb but when it gets bumped up, some issues arise with how the os deals with it. of course that is provided you have the right chips installed. :rolleyes: hehheh.....you may still see it as being slow after the correct memory is installed, if thats the case you may have to do some tweaking of the os to make it like 256mb. imho, and from my own experience, win2 would be a viable upgrade and much more useful. :cool:
 
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