Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Have you ever had an impression that your computer has been running slower and slower?
When I bought my computer exactly two years ago the performance of this machine during first few months was absolutely brilliant and no problems at all. But after a few months this fast and reliable machine started becoming slower and slower and more and more unwanted applications started working when I was switching on my laptop without my personal attention.
At that time I did not understand how the computers are working and how little I can control what is going on inside the operating system. This is not only problem of PC and Windows users, Apple products have the same issue from my Mac experience.
I am sure that I am not the only one who suffers from this problem and would like to hear your voice on this discussion. What are your ways of dealing with this issue? Every voice most welcome for our common benefits
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by DrWhams on
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The general reason for PC slowdowns is 'Crapware'. When you buy a new PC, or a new printer, mouse, wifi card, etc, it comes with a disk, and most users will install everything on the disk because they think it's required. 95% of the stuff that gets installed is of no use to anyone and will generally clag up your system and cause things to slow down bit by bit. It's death by a thousand cuts.
There are a few things that I do to make things more manageable. Firstly look at all the icons that are in the icon tray (in the bottom right hand corner on Windows). Click on each one to see what it actually does. If it's something that you've never used and looks like it may be crapware then uninstall it (on Windows: Control Panel -> Programs and Features). Everything you see in the icon tray gets loaded every time you boot up and runs all the time you're logged in, so if you've got lots of them then it'll slow your system down. While you're there, look through the list and if there are any programs that you never use then uninstall them.
The next thing I do is download Microsoft's Autoruns utility which shows all the applications that get started every time you boot up. Run it and select the 'Logon' tab. If there's anything there that doesn't look essential then untick the box next to it. If something stops working then just run it again and re-tick the box to go back to how it was.Lastly, for general de-cluttering lots of people rave about the CCleaner utility which cleans up lots of temporary files for many programs, and generally frees up a bit of space.
A word of warning: DON'T RUN ANY OF THE SYSTEM OPTIMISER PROGRAMS THAT POP UP ON WEBPAGES. Many of them are malware. Go for a reputable one (if in doubt, google for it)
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Permalink Reply by Marek on
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Hi Paul
Thank you very much for your exact description of cleaning processes.
It is amazing to me always how ignorant we are and how many things happen in our computers without our understanding and basic knowledge. When we buy our computers we tried them as electric equipment the same as a toaster or washing machine which supposed never be "dirty" or slow.
Let's continue this idea for a bit longer ...
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That is a very good point. It's not always obvious, but there are some things One class of things that can be removed is anything with a name like 'Speed launcher' (Adobe Acrobat Reader for instance installs this). It makes your computer a bit slower just so that the occasional pdf opens slightly faster. Open each of the applications and if looks like a crappy utility where you can see *what* it does, but you can't see *why* you'd ever need it then trash it. If it's something that looks like it may be essential for the hardware you have then keep it (eg if there's one called 'HP wireless printer manager' and you have a HP wireless printer, then leave it alone).
I've heard a number of people say that PC Decrapifier is good for getting rid of lots of this stuff, so you might want to try it. They have a handy list of the applications that their users most often remove , so have a look at that list to see if you have any of those things.
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Very good list Paul and hope somebody will remember this for a longer while
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Permalink Reply by John D on
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The chatroom " experts " always say defragment your hard drive and empty cookies and history on your control panel internet options. I never found it made the slightest difference.
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Hi John
From a few other "experts" I heard that de-fragmentation does not make any big changes as our hard drive are getting bigger and bigger and the only thing which we supposed to mind is not too leave less than 10% of the hard drive empty.
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That's very true, but also Windows defragments in the background anyway, so explicitly defragmenting won't generally make much difference unless your disk is very full
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Permalink Reply by pamish on
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But it's really nice to watch the little coloured squares rearranging themselves by magic. For hours.
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Yes Pamish watching these squares was realy nice but to see it in Windows Vista or Seven you need to download different software like DEFRAGGLER. This process takes sometimes days and sometimes you can take back impressive amount of space of your hard drive
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As I understand it, defragmentation doesn't give you more space: it just rearranges fragnented files so that the the hard drive head doesn't have to leap about the disc to read the complete file, thus slowing down the read process. it's a bit like putting your books in alphabetical order on your shelves, making it easier to find the one you want.
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