6000 General Windows Problems

Hi all,
I am using Windows XP home on a Dell Inspiron 6000 with 1gb or Ram and a 1.86ghz Pentium M processor.

My older HP laptop always jammed and went slowly until it crashed and refused to work. I upgraded to this laptop excited about the prospects of speed and reliability. I have now owned it 4 days having installed:

AVG Free
Zone Alarm
Spybot Search and destroy
and Spyware Blaster
I have already run Disk Defragmenter twice, and used CCleaner to clean stuff up.

So I really wanted to make sure I keep things clean and safe but . . . I am already regularly getting the following 2 problems:

When I have 4 or more applications running sometimes when I clikc on the program on the toolbar it won't come up, making me minimize all the pages from the top right icons in order to find the programs. Sometimes I can't seem to open the program at all.

It's happened twice today already: I click Hibernate it starts to hibernate and jams on the 'starting to hibernate' screen. I was hibernating as a result of everything kind of jamming so I hadn't save some important schoolwork and guess what? Open Office didn't recover it, and I lost an hour of work.,

So how come the computers at school work so flawlessly when I use them, and now even I have a fast computer, It still doesn't really work that well?

How do I improve this?
Thanks

 

Did you ever do a reformat?

 

Not completely sure what that is?
Thanks for the help

 

Look at the sticky on the top of the dell forum. There is a guide for it.

 

ah right thanks I see,

but actually I bought the laptop new 4 days ago

I guess its just typical computer hitches that occur sometimes, and I'll live with it.

Sorry for being thick, thanks for the help

 

Be sure to get rid of all the crapware Dell impregnates their machines with. They cause problems and slow-downs.

 

Like the guys said, it is most likely all of the software that dell puts on there. If you reformat your computer, you'll see a tremendous amount of improvement. If you aren't comfortable doing that, then try add/remove programs. This won't do as good as reformatting, but it will give some improvement.

The hibernation problem is most likely due to some program that won't let it go into hibernation.

SG

 

Thanks for the help, I seemed to have some odd spyware that I think removing it helped as hibernate worked fine afterwards..
If you don't mind I've got two more dumb questions:

1) Recently I had a blue screen of death that precisly named ati3duag.dll as the culprit. Is there anything I should do with this file to prevent it from happening again.

2) My laptop is wokrking perfectly efficiently except screensavers which run very slowly (eg 1 fps instead of 30fps). Anyone know why this is?

oh and slightly OT, I would quite like one of those clear snap on lids for the back of the screen a) to protect it, and b) to add something pretty to it and maybe put some personal details in it incase something happens.

Anyone have any idea where I could get one of these (UK preferably)?

Thanks again for all the help

 

Check the UK site for those cover kits. As for your first question - whenever you get the blue death screen, you need to do a reformat or is really suggested to do so

And for the screen savers, they actually can slow a computer down as simple as that and it must be a big (sive and movement) and it lags because of its size.

 

THanks:

But I didn't realise that a blue screen was bad enough to warrant wiping the hard drive and reinstalling everything. . . . .

Sorry to be aggravating, but on the Dell website I can find the snap on covers for the 17 inch screens (9100 etc) sold seperately but not for the 15 inch ones like the 6000. Is there a specific place I should be looking?

Thanks for all the help

 

I dont know about the covers for the 6000 but on the blue screen of death, its pretty serious but it happens to everyone at some point.

 

I wouldn't worry to much about the bluescreen of death. Its part of M$. Although since it is ati*.dll it might be related to your video driver. You might try reinstalling it.

As for the covers, there are on dell's website under notebook accessories-->notebook covers. Here is a link for the US site of the covers
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productlisting.aspx?c=us&l=en&cs=19&category_id=5969&first=true

SG

 

Its not absolutely necessary but I would not trust windows for this matter (its microsoft after all) ....and wiping everything clean is probably the best way to go.