Very Slow XP After Installation

[ravenousj]

A friend of mine gave me his tower to fix after being affected my ad-ware or possibly virus. i reformatted and reinstalled xp. found that is is super slow and will only start in safe mode. i found out that it only has a 10gb hd. so i put in a 160gb drive and installed xp the same. but outcome is same. still very slow but i manage to start it up regularly(not safe mode). i check the cpu and reapplied more thermal compound. i check it with other graphics card. i mean with the reformatting it should of wiped out everything encluding the ad-ware or virus , right. unless the motherboard is infected. right now, i just installed anti-virus software and going to do a scan.

PC:
dell 8200 dimension
p4 1.7ghrtz
160gb hd
512rdram

[Ajmukon]

p4 1.7ghrtz
512rdram

well, it is not the RAM or the CPU (although both are a bit low)
XP min (P3 and 256 Mb RAM)

try Replacing the CMOS battery first!

[mjc]

Well, the first thing...have you installed all the correct drivers (chipset, audio, graphics, network, etc)?

Often without the proper chipset/IDE drivers you will not see UDMA modes on the drive channels.

Without the video drivers, you'll be limited to mostly software emulation and standard VGA modes.

Both of those will slow a system to a stand-still.

Also, by default, a fresh, clean install of XP is going to have a bunch of unneeded background items running, and some of those, like automatic updates will kill performance, especially if the machine is not hooked up to the internet...waiting for autoupdate to timeout is about as fun as watching paint dry.

Have you actually done any updates/service packs to it?

[ravenousj]

havnt tried the windows update yet. i'll try that next

[ravenousj]

cmos battery i believe is still good. still keeps date and time correctly

[ravenousj]

Does anyone know the symptom of a failed cpu?

[Fruss Tray Ted]

Power supply could turn on and that's it. No beeps, no video,, nuthin but sit there. There's probably other symptoms but that's one of them.