De-partitioning and slow pc.

[donovanjose]

Hello All,

I would please like some help with a possible de-partitioning and slow pc problem, from anyone who might be able to help me.

I have a desktop pc running XP Home Edition sp3. I believe that the motherboard is a Radion 7200. The pc has 767MB of RAM. The hard drive before partitioning was 10GB. An acquaintance partitioned the hard drive some time ago. The C partition is now 4.77MB NFTS with only 729MB available free space. The D partition is now 4.76MB FAT32 with 2.85GB free space.

Before I added the half gigabyte chip to RAM which had previously only been 256MB, the pc was doing the work as if it was really overloaded, and often it just couldn’t get anywhere. I added the half gigabyte and now it seems to be not confused at all, however, it is still very slow.

I thought that maybe the partitioned hard drive, or the very full C partition was causing the slowness.

I would be glad to hear from anyone who has an informed suggestion about how I could speed-up the pc, and do you think that de-partitioning would help matters.

Thanks for reading this and I hope to hear from you.

Donovanjose

[gerbil]

C: of 5GB.
Is Windows there? My XP takes up 3.8GB of space inside its own 8GB partition. There are no data files, no temp files, no third party applications other than a registry backup pgm [Erunt]. I think your 5GB space is far too small. I bet you could not buy a new 10GB hdd anywhere, now. Time to upgrade, I feel. A moderately small drive [by todays bloated standards] of 150GB capacity should do... smaller will not be cheaper, somewhat bigger will not be more expensive. eg 250GB.
your Windows would be having problems with fragmenting and lack of space for housekeeping files as they are rewritten to disk.

[Xlphos]

Hello,

A 10GB harddrive is very small with todays standards.

You could use a linux live cd to delete the FAT32 partition and extend the NTFS one.

You could also alter you page filing system; create a pagefile on the FAT32 partition lets say 2GB (assuming the partiton is empty) then remove the page file from the C drive. This should leave you with a partition for your page file and the other for the operating system etc...

Were it me I would get a new computer but failing that a new hard drive. You must find out the type of the hard drive; I suspect you hard drives are PATA or IDE(as some say). You could get a card to allow you to use SATA but with your specs I don't think it would be worth it.

And it would certainly be worthwhile defraging your hard drive; I bet theres a lot of fragmented files on that disk.

- Let us know how it goes.

[donovanjose]

Thank you "gerbil" and "xlphos". You have both given me ideas to start working on. I knew that 10GB was really small by today's standards, also to date the pc has met my needs, however, I think it is time to make a big change. I'll let you know what happens.

donovanjose