OT: Speeding up a slow computer

[Will]

dogscoff said:

Wouldn't it make more sense to move the swap rather than C: ?I guess it depends how much memory he has and how often the swap is used. Does Windows allow you to put your swap drive onto a USB flash drive? They tend to be pretty quick if you have a spare USB2 slot, and you can get a gig or two for pocket change these days. Then you could have Windows on one hard drive, games, programs and data on another and swap on USB, for super-fast performance=-)

But do max out your memory first, as Will suggests.

IIRC, it isn't normally possible to move the pagefile (swap) from C:. I'm sure there's some hack to get it stored elsewhere, but it's likely one of those annoying things that resets itself all the time, so more trouble than it's worth. As for using a thumbdrive as swap space, like AstralWanderer said, write times are slower. Although the overwriting of data isn't really that big of a deal unless you are doing very memory intensive tasks that start and stop new address spaces a lot (most people don't). It's easier for a virtual memory manager to keep a page in swap even after it's read back into main memory, since if the page is not dirty and is picked to go back into swap, the manager doesn't need to write it again, which increases performance a bit.

And Xrati has a good point as well. Norton et. al. tends to slow things down a lot, since they actively scan files in the background. Not computationally intensive, but very I/O intensive, and that will slow things down a lot. There's better products out there.

[Fyron]

I had no trouble at all moving swap to a different partition when my C was running out of space in the past. Maybe windows decided not to move it back to C due to lack of space, maybe it works as advertised. Hard to say. Still, I've always found claims of actual performance gain from shuffling swaps around to be rather dubious...

[dogscoff]

Well, 2 gigs is plenty for XP, I really don't think your slowdown is due to insufficient ram (unless you have a bad mem stick in there, I suppose). I think it's just Windows rot.

If that's the case, you can defrag and clear the registry and uninstall unwated crap to get some of your performance back but you really need to wipe the hard drive and re-install the OS (or re-install some OS, anyway). It's the only way to be sure.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Nuke it from orbit!

[Renegade 13]

That's what I feared Seems odd that a computer (or, more specifically, an operating system) would kinda 'decay' over time. I mean, it's just bits stored on a magnetic storage device, it shouldn't be *able* to decay!

[Solymr]

Trust me, it happens. As you use the OS more it accumulates more and more "rubbish".

I'm building a new computer and while I'm waiting for the RAM to come in, I've preinstalled XP onto a new hard drive with this computer. Now, the copy of XP on one of the drives on here that I boot from has been installed for a year and a half now and pretty much runs poorly. The fresh XP install on the new hard drive runs like a dream, and ran Oblivion really sweet on this computer, which normally would be a bit jumpy.

[capnq]

Renegade 13 said:Seems odd that a computer (or, more specifically, an operating system) would kinda 'decay' over time. I mean, it's just bits stored on a magnetic storage device, it shouldn't be *able* to decay!

Believe it or not, passing cosmic rays can flip individual bits on magnetic media.

Another problem on really old media is the "glue" holding the magnetic particles to the surface of the media deteriorating. The stuff you have to occaisionally clean off tape heads is particles that have scraped off the tape.

Most of the debris my registry cleaner finds is references to files that have been deleted.

[dogscoff]

That's what I feared Seems odd that a computer (or, more specifically, an operating system) would kinda 'decay' over time. I mean, it's just bits stored on a magnetic storage device, it shouldn't be *able* to decay!

Well, even if we disregard fragmentation, the crap cluttering up the registry, all the pointless bloat that wants to install itself and autostart, the malware and everything else, and not wanting to sound like a conspiracy theorist, bear in mind that if your OS worked flawlessly forever, you'd never want to buy the next one...

[Xrati]

Xrati said:
(ideally you want between 32 to 40)

then Fyron said: Where did this range come from?

Fyron, that is an average I've found from personel experiences working for many companies over the years. The more processes, the slower the computer.

When you install Win XP, right after the final reboot but before you install any programs, if you do a ctrl-alt-del you will have about 16 processes running. After that it just goes up as you add on programs. Quick launch programs get put into memory and become active processes that slow down your performance. You can create shortcuts to these rather then have them in memory waiting to be used. Also defragging once a month will help disk efficiency. A good registry cleaner used monthly will also keep small bits of lost or deleted files from building up in your registry. Also, for those who keep the power on all the time, a reboot will flush memory and release some of the registry entries for cleaning up. Good maintenance will keep your computer in good running condition.

[Fyron]

Defragmentation is 99% useless. Disk read rates are so high these days that any effect of fragmentation in modern file systems is nullified. There are occasional uses for degramentation, such as a bizarre case of 90% fragmented drives, but for the most part, its a relic of a bygone age. Its especially useless to have a policy of defragmenting before installing new games or large programs...

Xrati:
Look at the total CPU Time for such processes; anything that has 0:00:05 CPU Time after 2 weeks of running (most such services) is not going to be bogging anything down, especially when its total memory usage is in the 100s of KBs. If you see unnecessary services that have significant amounts of CPU Time and/or Mem Usage, removing them can help (a little bit). I just think your time is better served cleaning the registry and such, than stopping services that use almost 0 resources in the big picture.