Reply to: Speed up PC and Defrag Software

[Paddy]

Reinstall then

As I have previously. Windows OS is like having a non housetrained puppy in the house. You will occasional find poo left around or even hidden. You can clean it up but then one day it eats laxative and no matter how hard you try and clean the mess, it smells and leaves marks. That it is the time to throw out the carpet and replace it.

[BoredBloke]

A max of 2gb of RAM is a bit rubbish for a laptop that is only 3 years old. My old Tosh has 4 in it and it belts along for its age!

[Support Monkey]

do a search for all tmp files *.tmp bin the lot then clear down the system restore folder (hidden system folder, you need to unhide hidden and system files, then on the security tab for system volume folder add your self and give yourself full permissions otherwise you will not get in) clear down the folders within, these are all the old restore points and in extreme cases can fill a hard drive up then create a new restore point if you rely on these

then good old defrag do it a couple of times if it still looks fragmented and finally cmd line chkdsk /r (cannot lock the drive so runs at next startup) to repair any startup issues.

[eek]

Holographic storage gets my vote.

The patents from the first companies doing that have now run out of time.

Over $1bn has been spent on that technology so far and it still doesn't even exist.

[scooterscot]

Holographic storage gets my vote.

You need substance to store information,

[doodab]

GF chef's 3yr old XP laptop is running a bit sluggish.

You mean she has used yours and now she realises how slow it is?

Pagedefrag can help, some of the other sysinternals tools are good for working out what is doing what i.e. hammering the disk, registry etc.

Fire up msconfig and have a look through the list of start up stuff, the amount of adobe / apple / google crap in there can be astonishing. Some of it can probably be switched off.

You might also try downgrading to older versions of office, firefox etc. Newer versions of stuff tend to grow to use the available resources so regular upgrades mean your PC is gradually getting left behind. You can also look at getting rid of superfluous browser plugins.

[AtW]

Holographic storage gets my vote.

[gingerjedi]

GF chef's 3yr old XP laptop is running a bit sluggish.

Steps taken so far:

1) Diskeeper 2010 is on and is happily defragmented the drives (c for progs, d for data)
Q: Any better defrag software recommended than Diskeeper?
2) DiskCleanup has been run and cleared up a lot
3) Temp Internet files cleaned
4) Malware bytes reports no malware
5) RAM has been maxed to 2Gb
6) Hard Disks C) 120Gb size / 60Gb used , D) 80Gb size / 78Gb available
7) Avira is her antivirus of choice and has never affected speed to date (unlike Norton for example)

It doesn't run hot (i.e fan is almost silent)

Any other tips to improve speed?

IMO none of the above will help much, reinstall is the only option and will be quicker than pissing around.

[scooterscot]

Buy her a Mac.

WDP said.

My 2006 MBP still moves as fast as the day I bought.

[TheFaQQer]

I'm not looking to improve speed from what it originally was, I'm looking for ways to get the machine back to the speed it was around the time it was bought 3 years ago

WSCS

Reinstall then

[chef]

SSD

I'm not looking to improve speed from what it originally was, I'm looking for ways to get the machine back to the speed it was around the time it was bought 3 years ago

i.e ideas for spring cleaning the machine

[wobbegong]

SSD

WTFS!

[chef]

Reinstall then

Also an option but I'll try pagedefrag and ccleaner first

[Spacecadet]

I agree that is a solution but as she does nothing but write a few word docs and check her emails then an upgrade shouldn't really be needed.

Reinstall then

[TheFaQQer]

SSD