How can I speed my machine up?

[allgonepetetong]

I'm running a pentium 4, 3.2mhz with Windows.

Lately it seems to be getting slower and slower on boot up and generally performing with less speed.

Any suggestions welcome

thanks

Pete

[puggit]

First of all - clean the machine up - use something like CCleaner to get rid of unused temp files, cookies etc...

Second of all - defrag the drive(s).

Thirdly - clean the desktop of any icons which are not shortcuts. These are all loaded in to memory and take away resources.

Fourthly (and where you start to pay) - add more memory, and then consider upgrading the CPU

[neil_cardiff]

allgonepetetong said:

I'm running a pentium 4, 3.2mhz with Windows.

Lately it seems to be getting slower and slower on boot up and generally performing with less speed.

Any suggestions welcome

thanks

Pete

Rebuild windows.

I kid you not.

A fresh install of Windows XP is fantasticly quick. It evens performs some boot up trickery to make it even quicker.

Trouble is, when you install applications etc, you write all sorts of registry keys for it to load upon boot up, which is why you get the slower boot over time. Add to that disk fragmentation, and you have a recipe for a slower machine.

It could be, however, an impending disk failure if the machines disk access is slowing - a dodgy hard drive will make a mahine go really slow over time until it finally fails.

ETA you could throw money at it too, like more money, but I'd start with the basic.

Edited by neil_cardiff on Wednesday 26th July 09:33

[pdV6]

Also, see if you can find a registry cleaning tool like MS' old RegClean utility. It whips through the registry and zaps any invalid entries. Can make quite a bit of difference.

[allgonepetetong]

thanks guys - I'll work through them one at a time

cheers

[GregE240]

What Neil said, and if you can slipstream service packs / hotfixes, then so much the better...

[momentofmadness]

How much memory does it have?

Adding more memory to mine saved me buying a new PC

Just a thought!

[Miles_stylus]

"Rebuild windows. "

Does this not remove all the Apps etc which take ages to load back on?

Thanks

Miles

[FunkyNige]

Miles_stylus said:

"Rebuild windows. "

Does this not remove all the Apps etc which take ages to load back on?

Thanks

Miles

If you do it properly then yes. In my experience it doesn't make that much difference with XP, with WIndows 98 it made a mammoth difference but XP isn't too bad.

If you download CCleaner (mentioned above) you can select which programs you want to run at startup - a lot of programs will load a little bit when you turn the computer on (eg. Quicktime, RealPlayer, etc.) so stopping them running at startup will make things a bit quicker.

You could try overclocking but it's not for the faint hearted.

[medicineman]

Have you run spyware cleaners?

[robdickinson]

Windows seems to reduce your drives IO speeds on errors, and never ever increases it.

Goto device manager and select IDE ATAPI controllers.

Goto properties on the primary IDE chanel (with the main HDD attached) and see what it says on tab 'advanced settings' for current transfer mode.

[Zad]

Yeah, it's definitely worth checking your drives are operating in DMA not PIO.

The easiest way to do a clean install is to use a brand spanking new disk drive (160Gb drives going for £35 now) and install the OS on there. When it has installed, install the old drive as a slave and make links to the old installed software. In theory it should need all sorts of registry entries but rarely does. This has the benefit of not nuking the entire drive should the OS installation go titsup.

[allgonepetetong]

[quote=FunkyNige
If you download CCleaner (mentioned above) you can select which programs you want to run at startup - a lot of programs will load a little bit when you turn the computer on (eg. Quicktime, RealPlayer, etc.) so stopping them running at startup will make things a bit quicker.

[/quote]

I have a feeling that this is my problem, when booting up my machine it is starting all kinds of applications in the background:

Bluetooth
Printer software
and half a dozen other unnecessary bits and pieces

fingers crossed

Thanks all

[scorp]

Doesn't the built-in tool "MSConfig" allow you to specify what starts at boot-time?