Help...any PC expert here?

[anuar ahmad]

Lately my pc(athlon 2600+, 2gb ddr ram, 128mb radeon, XP SP3) has been very sluggish while PP some RAW files.
Cleared the registry and folders of all junks.

Thought i clean it of all the dust that has accumulated inside after a couple of years untouched.

Added another 1gb to make 2gb.
Cleared the heat-sink coumpound between the heat-sink & cpu.
Didn't re-apply it after that...and decided to add another fan.

Now regretted opening & cleaning all the dust inside.
My PC would reboot itself when i try to run any program.

But then when i open the side casing and face it to my home fan...it could run all the programs without any problem.

Any expert advice?

...will re-applying the heat-sink compound help?

 

[sammy888]

...will re-applying the heat-sink compound help?

OF COURSE LAH BRUDDER!!!!!!! That is the most dangerous thing to do leh heh.. This compound is what ensure the contact between the CPU to the conduit that will conduct away the heat from your CPU is optimised!!!! hehe....

How old is your computer? The older it gets ... wear and tear takes place and heat will be come worst enemy over time!!..

The fact that your CPU was overheating so the safety feature built into the chip and also your Motherboard..will shut itself down to SAVE YOUR COMPUTER FROM PERMANENT DEATH!!!! heheeheh.... so tomolo...you go buy more of that hear sink compound!! BUT!!!..don't over do it too... it is suppose to be a very very think layer... putting too much is just a bad!!... Spread it out thinly and evenly on the top part of the CPU where you see the heat sink fan contact the cpu.

 

[anuar ahmad]

OF COURSE LAH BRUDDER!!!!!!!

Wah...still up?

That's what i suspected too.
Thought spend the holiday do some maintenance.
Yes tomorrow got to rush down and get that heat sink compound.

Its abt 4years old and not over-clocked running at 2ghz...and its the first time i opened the casing. Should've snapped a pic of all the dust inside and share it with fellow CSer.

Thanks a lot...

 

[zac08]

Dust is common... I have to remove the dust on my heat sink regularly, else the fan will get overworked and overheat.... tat's when it gets noisy and slow down....

 

[sammy888]

Wah...still up?

That's what i suspected too.
Thought spend the holiday do some maintenance.
Yes tomorrow got to rush down and get that heat sink compound.

Its abt 4years old and not over-clocked running at 2ghz...and its the first time i opened the casing. Should've snapped a pic of all the dust inside and share it with fellow CSer.

Thanks a lot...

ya...dust bunnies as we call them that accumulates on your PC is not a good thing as it will generate heat buildup, make ventilations and heat transfer less effective...as your PC age...heat is your worst enemies. Usually spring cleaning a system by taking your system apart once a year will do wonders to ensuring that you have a system that last and last long. I have built for a friend a 486DX and it is till running!

Also adding RAM will help you see some improvement in the way Photoshop will carry out your editing. Remember that once you have added the RAM ...if you don;t know this by now... go into preference mode of Photoshop and adjust how it uses the extra ram. That tweaking will help ensure how much RAM it gets to play with as it will be sharing it with Window's RAM needs too. Also.... how full is your HDD??? If your HDD is running low...that is another reason why Photoshop is slowing down. As it runs out of RAM to use...it will start to use your HDD to simulate RAM but as you may or may not know.. HDD is hundreds of times slower then RAM speed...thus..slow down in Photoshop. Also try to defrag your HDD too once you have backup your data.. A badly defrag HDD will slow down too.

 

[anuar ahmad]

... go into preference mode of Photoshop and adjust how it uses the extra ram. That tweaking will help ensure how much RAM it gets to play with as it will be sharing it with Window's RAM needs too. Also.... how full is your HDD???

I didn't realised Photoshop has that feature. All the while using its usual editing tools only. Guess i've never played much with it.

Sometimes i do play about with the virtual RAM adjusting from min 1535 to 4096 max and yes i'm aware the virtual RAM is very much slower than the actual RAM itself.

Currently the 80gb HDD is about 40% free and very soon there'll be no space.
I've planned to add a secondary drive to free up the primary drive.

Actually i had a secondary drive but it crashed due to numerous bad sectors.
Luckily some but not all of my files were recovered and transferred to the current primary drive.

Now relying on my slow moe R40 thinkpad.


Thank you once again...

 

[ninelives]

Thought i clean it of all the dust that has accumulated inside after a couple of years untouched.

dust wont slow down your pc / laptop....... but if dust get accumulated on your fans or psu or GPU, it might get hotter and your PC/laptop will hang...but dust wont slow down your PC.

it gets slower because over the months, you have installed lot of soft wares/utilities, the auto update might also install lot of patches. your hard disk /partition got fragmented.

antivirus can also be the culprit. most antivirus will slow down your pc as your os/boot partition become larger and larger...

 

[skypacker]

Yeah, you definitely need to reapply the thermal paste and re-seat the heatsink on the CPU. As Sammy888 mentioned, the CPU is overheating and shutting down to prevent permanent damage.

Get a bigger HDD...even 500GB is pretty cheap these days..$140 or so in SLS. Most HDDs today are SATA, but maybe your mobo is a bit old, so supports only PATA. Best to confirm before you buy a new drive.

Best case scenario is to build a new system from ground up. A nice Core2 Duo or quad will help immensely during RAW PP. I went from a AMD A64 San Diego 3700+ to a Intel E6550 Core 2 Duo last year and the difference was stunning.

If you can't build new rig, then some basic maintenance may help. After you put back the heatsink (with the thermal paste!)

-ofcourse blow out the dust and dirt. Upgrade RAM, HDD.

-Run virus scan. Ensure system is malware free. I use AVG 8 free for my comps. There are both free as well as paid versions of this antivirus. Another one with a free edition is Avast. Kaspersky is a good option for a paid solution. I would not recommend Norton or McAffee as both as resource hogs and actually have poor detection rates.

-Run disk cleanup to clear up some space. Use the built-in disk cleanup utility. Also, good idea to uninstall old programs you dont need.

-Defrag the hard drives. File fragmentation reduces HDD read and write performance so keep the drives clean. I use Diskeeper 2009 Pro, which is far better than the Windows defragger. It's not free, but there are 30 day free trial versions at http://www.diskeeper.com so you can download and use it for a month.

-Update hardware drivers as necessary, and install all the Microsoft critical updates (to beef up security).

Hope this helps.

 

[anuar ahmad]

Thanks for all the advice.

Got the thermal compound kit HTK-002 from cooler master and applied them.
So far so good and happy to be able to use and reply to all the advice given from the said pc.

Yes i do agree with the suggestion that Norton & McAfee takes up alot of the resources with poor detection rate and am running AVG software too.

One think for sure...i really need a bigger HDD...

Thanks sammy888, skypacker and the rest for all the valuable advice.

 

[sammy888]

Thanks for all the advice.

Got the thermal compound kit HTK-002 from cooler master and applied them.
So far so good and happy to be able to use and reply to all the advice given from the said pc.

Yes i do agree with the suggestion that Norton & McAfee takes up alot of the resources with poor detection rate and am running AVG software too.

One think for sure...i really need a bigger HDD...

Thanks sammy888, skypacker and the rest for all the valuable advice.

If you can afford to get it...get NOD32. You will not regret this one. It is pretty cheap if you can get it at Sim Lim...but the most important is...even since I got that one....I have been having a hard time catching a virus. The real reason for getting it are: IT is updated everday and it does all this in the background and you hardly... hardly even notice it did so that is how small and little resource it KAPO from your CPU cycle. Plus it is so small...that it does not bother to KAPO your RAM space. It's scanning and updates are one of the best around. It is very up to date and if you practice good internet usages...you will find it is not that easy to catch a virus and you don't need to buy a MAC to boost a virus free system. Usuaully virus and spamware hits you due to human behavour. Most of the virus and spam programmers don't need to programmer smarter virus. They usually rely on human nature.

Never ever use Norton, McAfee..etc... totally bloated ware and too commercial and well targeted by virus writers.