Sea

Recipes 

My year old computer is threatening its already short life with the anger it induces in me as it takes it's sweet effing time to do just about anything anymore. The guy who sold it to me (local custom computer building place in business for 15 years), claims that he moves all his data to an external, and reinstalls his OS about twice a year to keep his machines running at their peak.

This seems a little drastic for the casual user such as myself. Any software, or other techniques out there that could help restore the lightning quick operation of the machine I bought?

I do the basics like error checking, defragmentation, virus control, etc.

Thanks.

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Corrupt Brewers

k1v1116

Recipes 

after running scans for viruses/spyware/adware and going through your list of installed programs to remove anything you dont need.
right on my computer select properties, advanced tab, under performance click settings, under the visual effects tab select adjust for best performance, you may want leave a few visual effects turned on, I usually leave: "show translucent selection rectangle, show window contents while dragging, and use common tasks in folders" this should speed things up a little.
you may want to remove some programs from your startup and system tray, there are many tutorials online for doing this.
reinstalling windows once a year or so does help and while its not completely necessary its usually easier than trying to remove every trace of the **** that's slowing your computer down/ messing it up.

EDIT: I assume your using windows XP but you didnt say specifically.

Krazy Bazturd

Recipes 

Defragment your hard drive.

Borisbbadd

Recipes 

Add more RAM

If your running XP, turn off the themes, it gives your computer an older look, but seems to help alot.

Uninstall software that you don't use.

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hammer1

Recipes 

first go to control panal , add remove programs, find all the programs you dont want anymore right these down on paper. then go ahead and remove them . when your done exit control panal @click on start -run type in regedit in the top left find FIND and type in those programs that you deleted i guarantee it will come up, right click and delete it do this on everything you don't want this will help ..be careful doing this be sure it is not a windows system file.. windows stores all these files in here even though you thought you deleted them this is the only way to to totally rid them from your machine .. when your done restart pc run defragmenter restart pc and your pc should run better.........as far as pc s running slower that's a inherent disadvantage of windows OS and yes i also reformat me harddrive about every 6 months ....

MikeFlynn74

Recipes 

Run Adaware
Uninstall crap
Defrag
switch to linux mint

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HBHoss

Recipes 

Go to Technology News, Computer and Notebook Reviews, Computer News, Computer Mods, PC News | Maximum PC it has all sorts of free software and tips to help you.

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hammer1

Recipes 

regedit
not msconfig
sorry

Kilgore_Trout

Recipes 

Use a utility like ccleaner to clean up temp files and old useless reg entries.

Use msconfig to clean up your startup.

Remove unwanted apps.


Ram is almost free, doesn't really "solve" the problem but it does help.

Re-installing an OS that often is silly, doing that just indicates a lack of knowledge :/ .

Hard drive defrags are not going to help much, it's a good practice but people throw it around as a solution far too often. At best you'll get a slightly tangible speed increase, but I wouldn't even expect that. They teach you to tell people this in tech support because it takes a long time and gets you off the phone, not because it really works well.


If you don't NEED windows, this isn't actually too bad of an idea. Although it will be a bit of a learning experience, probably more than you want.

The biggest thing is cleaning up old/unused applications. I'm assuming that your PC (like most) has a ton of random utilities chugging along doing nothing 24/7 (scanner software and the like).

Laughing_Gnome_Invisible

Recipes 

+1 on Ccleaner. It's free, and gets all the crap out much better than windows.

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