cbclark
04-15-2008, 07:41 PM
Forgive me if this has already been posted, I didn't see anything during a quick search.
I had a Dell Dimension 1100 in the shop a few days ago, customer complained of it running very slowly. I booted up and confirmed the complaint, and noted that there was no antivirus of any type installed. I went ahead and pulled the hard drive out and plugged into the shop computer to scan it, and found almost a thousand baddies throughout the system32 directory.
At this point I went ahead and called the customer and made sure that there were no important files to be saved, etc. After she agreed that a reload would be fine with her, I started re-installing windows XP.
Right off the bat I noticed that it took an abnormally long time to copy the initial files to memory, and when that finally finished the rest of the setup process was taking ridiculous amounts of time.
I went to check my emails while this was happening, and started surfing around various posts in several forums. I happened upon a post talking about very slow windows setup on Dell PCs, and since I was experiencing the problem I read into it.
There seems to be a trick with these Dells to remedy this, and that is to remove the CMOS battery for a couple of minutes, reinstall it and boot up again. After setting the BIOS date and time again, I booted from the windows CD and this time the setup routine was running as normal.
My boss and I were a bit surprised that this fix worked, but it did save a lot of time waiting.
I had a Dell Dimension 1100 in the shop a few days ago, customer complained of it running very slowly. I booted up and confirmed the complaint, and noted that there was no antivirus of any type installed. I went ahead and pulled the hard drive out and plugged into the shop computer to scan it, and found almost a thousand baddies throughout the system32 directory.
At this point I went ahead and called the customer and made sure that there were no important files to be saved, etc. After she agreed that a reload would be fine with her, I started re-installing windows XP.
Right off the bat I noticed that it took an abnormally long time to copy the initial files to memory, and when that finally finished the rest of the setup process was taking ridiculous amounts of time.
I went to check my emails while this was happening, and started surfing around various posts in several forums. I happened upon a post talking about very slow windows setup on Dell PCs, and since I was experiencing the problem I read into it.
There seems to be a trick with these Dells to remedy this, and that is to remove the CMOS battery for a couple of minutes, reinstall it and boot up again. After setting the BIOS date and time again, I booted from the windows CD and this time the setup routine was running as normal.
My boss and I were a bit surprised that this fix worked, but it did save a lot of time waiting.