OT: Speeding up a slow computer

[Suicide Junkie]

Quality vs Quantity.

Look for the big hogs, and go from there

[Atrocities]

I don't know if this has been mentioned or not, but if your PC is 2.5 years old perhaps you might need too blow out the dust from the inside of the case if you haven't already. That might help it to run cooler and thus improve speed slightly.

[Renegade 13]

Atrocities said:
I don't know if this has been mentioned or not, but if your PC is 2.5 years old perhaps you might need too blow out the dust from the inside of the case if you haven't already. That might help it to run cooler and thus improve speed slightly.

Yep, I regularly clean out the dust, as where I live we get a ton of it. About every 2-3 months, I crack her open and take out wads of the stuff

[Atrocities]

That reminds me, I should clean mine today.

[Fyron]

You might want to invest in some filter screens for your case then. Sure you just move to having to clean the filter periodically, but thats better than dust actually inside the system.

[Xrati]

It's the memory usage Fyron, not the CPU usage. If you have a program that you don't use tying up memory, then that will slow down the rest of the programs trying to use extra memory. A good case in point would be your explorer.exe program. When you boot up it runs at about 15 to 17k memory. As you continue on the file will build up to 30k. You can "end process" and then start it again with no problems, as long as you have nothing running on your computer. Once you do that it will drop down in size and start to build up again.

As far as defragging goes, I've read posts where people just lose files/programs on disks as over time, XP will write over files and programs. That's why they (HDD OEM's) suggest that you defrag every once in a while to allow the OS to rewrite/update the FAT. It's not about speed or optimization.

I just rebuilt my neighbors computer. He didn't have 'dust bunnies' he had 'dust elephants" in the unit. It is a great idea to use filters. Even just a thin piece of foam that will let air flow thru. My computer has an intake and exhaust fan on it. The intake face has to be wiped down about once a week or it just looks like s#%t, with all the dust clinging to the cover.

[Fyron]

Even if you lose 20-30 MBs of RAM to background services, that won't really affect performance noticeably outside of the most memory-constrained hardware builds. How many games do you run that grind to a halt just because you only have 600 MB free RAM to let them use instead of 630 MB? Having bits of memory in-use as opposed to empty does not slow down access to other bits of memory, unless you manage to fill up the physical RAM entirely and cause hdd thrashing..

Now certainly, ditching huge memory hogs like NAV can net performance gains. Closing off larger programs like Skype and Instant Messengers, web browsers, etc., before you run a game can free up a lot of memory. I just don't see much potential in axing ~1MB background apps, esp. when they are hardly ever run by the task scheduler and get paged to disk.

"As far as defragging goes, I've read posts where people just lose files/programs on disks as over time, XP will write over files and programs."

It's fairly safe to assume such posters had a gross misunderstanding about how their system worked. Its far more likely hdd clusters randomly became corrupted at a physical level than some nebulous claims of XP overwriting existing file segments due to marginal fragmentation..

"That's why they (HDD OEM's) suggest that you defrag every once in a while to allow the OS to rewrite/update the FAT."

They just do that to shift blame away from themselves for less than perfect hdd manufacturing.

It can't hurt to defragment once a year or so, but don't think its some sort of panacea for your system's woes.

[Xrati]

Well, then with this wealth of information, Renegade has enough suggestionsz to get some more juice out of that ole computer of his. AND we've debunked some myths!!!

It's still a personnel preference as to what 'floats your boat' on computer upkeep.

[Renegade 13]

Indeed, the suggestions here have been quite useful, for which I thank you all. There is one more thing I'd like to ask though...I currently use Norton (I know, I know, it's the spawn of the devil), and would like to remove it and replace it with something less bloaty. However, I seem to recall hearing that it has an, umm...aversion to being removed. What would be the best and most thorough way of removing it? Also, if I'm going to remove it I'd like to have a replacement in place before I'm left anti-virus free As such, any suggestions on a quality, non-bloaty, (preferably free) alternative?

Again, thanks!

[Fyron]

That depends on whether you want a free AV, or a paid AV. AVG is a good free option, but like all free versions, its detection rates are not quite as good as commercial AV engines. This site has results of periodic AV engine tests (on the best commercial versions of each AV engine IIRC), very useful:

http://www.av-comparatives.org/

Avira and NOD32 tend to come out on top, especially in the proactive tests (which test detection of viruses with old definition libraries, testing the ability to identify new viruses).

As for removing Norton AV, Symantec bowed to pressure and released a complete uninstaller tool:

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT...05033108162039