if you think it's because of running bootskins, I can tell you that it isn't, and windows xp sp2 runs bootskins fine, I've been running them for almost 1 1/2 years and haven't had any problems with them.
- first thing uninstall bootskin, reboot your pc and make sure that the standard windows xp boot up screen appears. Once you've done that and it boots up properly, you can be assured that the bootskin app is no longer affecting your pc because it isn't running anymore. This way you can rule out bootskin affecting system performance.
- once you've booted up your pc and it's running, right click on the my computer icon on your windows desktop
- click on properties
- click on the "Advanced" page tab
- click on the "Settings" button in the performance section of that page
- click on "Adjust for Best Performance"
- click on Apply, click on OK, click on OK again
- Let's reboot the pc and see what happens, you've eliminated bootskin from the picture and you've reset windows to run as best as it can, which means no eye candy, running in classic mode
- once the pc boots up and you're logged into your pc, note the performance, is it slow still?
If so make note of other software that you've installed around the same time as the bootskin app and I would say everything, no matter how miniscule. If you're still having performance issues with windows I would say that it's either hardware related (possibly looming hardware failure: memory, harddrive, cpu, motherboard, videocard,etc, etc.), it could be hardware driver related (possibly you updated the drivers for a specific system component like a video card) or it could be software related (possibly you've installed antivirus or antispyware software and real-time scanning is having a noticeable effect on system performance) or it's a malware issue (spyware, viruses, rootkits, etc.)
- Don't discount any of these issues. When I'm working on pc's that belong to my friends, the #1 issue which is causing them system performance grief is malware/spyware/viruses, etc. They don't know how they got it, how it got installed on their machines but they have it and it slows their machines down to a crawl. If that's the case invest time into downloading some decent antispyware apps/antivirus apps and scan your system for this stuff and remove it.
- Disk cleanup/disk defrag is also a good idea - check out your harddrive space, do you have sufficient disk space on your system or are you running with just a few gb's left?
- Do you have enough memory installed on your system? I think a bare mimimum for an xpsp2 box would be 256mb (probably 512mb would be the bare minimum), maybe you need to add more ram to your system.
- maybe your system slowed down because it was in the middle of installing some windows critical/security updates and something happened during the install process? Go to the windows update site and download & install any/all applicable updates for your pc
- how about a windows registry scan & tuneup? Tune-up utilities (v2007 I believe) offers a fully working 30 day trial version, check it out, try it, it could help.
Spend some time working on your pc using some of these suggestions and let us know what you've found out.
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