Running slow and crashing sometimes

[Saltiel]

Hello there, and greetings from Brazil

Here's the thing: I have two identical Dell Vostro showing exactly the same problems, both run slow, but one of them sometimes 'goes wilder' than the other, crashing randomly, even when booting on Safe Mode. In a first moment I could understand that the old hardware (2007 model) was causing the whole mess.

Intel Atom 230 1.6GHz;
1 GB DDR2 667MHz;
160GB SATA HDD;
Windows Vista Home Basic

1GB + Vista + Atom = perfectly balanced life, universe and everything equation, yeah

These are work PCs so, there are no unnecessary softwares installed, and I put them online once a month, to check for important OS and AV updates. Most of the time, I leave them out of the gateway range. A few tweaks here and there, some unnecessary features disabled, like Aero, smart card and startup stuff, and disk cleanup; and the trick should be done, at least partially. Then I ran a chkdsk /f /r, and a defrag. Right after the clean and fresh reboot, I ran ProcessExplorer, and it showed me that:

Vostro I:

avgcsrvx.exe was using 58,620 KB
svchost.exe was using 104,824 KB (all instances)

Vostro II:

avgcsrvx.exe was using 89,448 KB
svchost.exe was using 132,652 KB (all instances)

Just to show you the most 'hungry' processes listed. And my patience is running out faster than these kids' systems.

The boss doesn't want me to upgrade the OS because he surely won't buy new licenses, and doesn't want to remove his genuine Vista to install cracked 7/8/10. And I'm not the #1 fan of formatting-first-research-after reasoning. Any light in the end of this tunnel? Need more info? Thank you all in advance!

 

[ChaoticWolf]

Windows Vista was never a stable operating system.

 

[Henry-Johnson]

Buy more RAM and max out your RAM. I'm guessing you are using a 32bit version of Windows, so you can only use 4GB.

Windows Vista is not a very stable operating system, however I've used it before with 3GB even and it was faster than 1GB.

 

[hang-the-9]

Hello there, and greetings from Brazil

Here's the thing: I have two identical Dell Vostro showing exactly the same problems, both run slow, but one of them sometimes 'goes wilder' than the other, crashing randomly, even when booting on Safe Mode. In a first moment I could understand that the old hardware (2007 model) was causing the whole mess.

Intel Atom 230 1.6GHz;
1 GB DDR2 667MHz;
160GB SATA HDD;
Windows Vista Home Basic

1GB + Vista + Atom = perfectly balanced life, universe and everything equation, yeah

These are work PCs so, there are no unnecessary softwares installed, and I put them online once a month, to check for important OS and AV updates. Most of the time, I leave them out of the gateway range. A few tweaks here and there, some unnecessary features disabled, like Aero, smart card and startup stuff, and disk cleanup; and the trick should be done, at least partially. Then I ran a chkdsk /f /r, and a defrag. Right after the clean and fresh reboot, I ran ProcessExplorer, and it showed me that:

Vostro I:

avgcsrvx.exe was using 58,620 KB
svchost.exe was using 104,824 KB (all instances)

Vostro II:

avgcsrvx.exe was using 89,448 KB
svchost.exe was using 132,652 KB (all instances)

Just to show you the most 'hungry' processes listed. And my patience is running out faster than these kids' systems.

The boss doesn't want me to upgrade the OS because he surely won't buy new licenses, and doesn't want to remove his genuine Vista to install cracked 7/8/10. And I'm not the #1 fan of formatting-first-research-after reasoning. Any light in the end of this tunnel? Need more info? Thank you all in advance!

Not sure what you can do here, you have a slow CPU, very low RAM amount and a 160 GB hard drive which means it's pretty old. Toss them, get new computers that are more than one step over a toaster which is about what an Atom CPU with 1 GB of DDR2 is. Unless you and the people using those things are working for free, the cost to maintain them, losing time to them running slow or crashing would probably be 10 times what would cost to replace them.