degading system performance with XP

[GeminiDaddy]

I'm not trying to rant against microsoft, but I have been ussing windows systems for a long time now, and I 've noticed that when you have a brand new system, it flies along for about 6 months or so, and the longer you keep the system, the more degraded the performance becomes, until it's at the point where its so slow as to almost be unusable. I have a pretty new dell laptop running XP, and I was optimistic, but it seems like its fate is becoming just like the rest of the windows systms I've had.

I do things like disk cleanup and defrag, but it seldom does anything. In fact, I when my dell laptop started acting a little slow, I ran a thorough defrag and system cleanup, and I swear the performance is even worse. I have also found in the past that completely wiping out the hardrive and reinstalling everything ususally returns the system to its inital quick running state, but its just not practical most of the time -

My Questions then:
1. Is it just me - do others out there notice similar?
2. What else can i do tweak the performance without wiping everything out and starting from scratch?

pain makes man think. thought makes man wise. wisdom makes life endurable

 

[vacunita]

Windows slows down when it has lots of stuff to load, and run.
As you continue installing stuff, each new app loads its own process, or service. Eahc process eats up memeory and processor speed. Slowing down other tasks.

The Principal way of fighting slowdowns ois to keep an eye on what you install, and what processes are running at startup.

Opening the Taskmanager will give you a list of running processes. some of them are required for windows to function but alot of them are just application loaders and stuff that really is not necessary. Along with that there is always Malware, and Spyware that also hogs resources and slow down the computer.

There are 2 basic things that should be done to ensure a optimal PC.

Running Antispyware and Malware tools on a regular basis.
This tools will find software that installs itself and uses system resources to run, and contributes to advertisments popping up when you browse the web. They can also constitute a securty hazard.

Disabling unnecessary processes from loading at startup. Will lessen the load of things running in the background and
and so will free up respources for other tasks.

Spyware Search and Destroy and Adware are good free tools that remove spyware.

There several apps that will help you identify processes that don't need to be running and can be disabled. Such as Quicktimes Qttask, or Realpplater's real loader app.

In any case mainting a optimixed PC is about more than defragging.

----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[jamesbird]

have a look in msconfig at all the things that 'chckoo' their way into the startup.
James

 

[DTracy]

Also, restore points will build into an incredibly large file and will slow a PC down considerably--check this out too.

 

[GeminiDaddy]

what is 'chckoo'? -


I'm fairly certain i've been free of spyware. Rightnow I'm running adaware and a thing called stinger.exe, and they all come up empty. Maybe I should install a third spyware utility?

It could be that I have a lot of software installed, but both the machines I'm complaining about now have about 1/2 of their hard drives free. My newest laptop I've taken extra care to make sure I didn't install a lot of junk, and still, it has become the worse offender of the two.


whenever i look in taskmgr, I always see stuff running, but I never know what it is without looking it up. When looking for the 'HOGS', its always stuff that is recognizable, like outlook or ie. There are a lot of other apps taking up small amounnts of memory, do i need to go thru, find out what each is and then disable it? YOu mentioned Quicktimes Qttask, or Realpplater's real loader app - are they free utilites?

pain makes man think. thought makes man wise. wisdom makes life endurable

 

[GeminiDaddy]

what are restore points?

pain makes man think. thought makes man wise. wisdom makes life endurable

 

[DTracy]

System restore points--is a series of files that are backed up that contain a "picture" of how your PC looks at the time. Then if someting goes wrong the user can move back to one of those restore points and fix their problems. Look in the Control Panel>System>Sytem Restore for more information.

Regards,
David

 

[vacunita]

Quicktime's Qttask and Realplayer's Real loader app are the most common of resource hoggers in any Pc, as they are installed with each of there parent applications Quicktime and Realplayer. They load themselves at startup and remain there consuming resources.

Close every application you have running, like outlook and Internet explorer etc... so that they don't appear in the process list. Then take a look at it and see whats running,

Normally you'll find 4 or 5 svchosts.exe processes. thats o.k.
you'll have an lsass.exe
a services.exe winlogon.,exe those are all windows processes that need to run. The System Idle Process should be in the 80-90 CPU column when you have nothing opened. and are just looking at the taskmanager.

Also some Antivirus programs such as Norton and Mcafee will have 4 or 5 processes running for themselves to function properly, those you need to keep.

Anything else you should try to identify what it is, and wether it needs to be running or not. anything related to Quicktime or Realplayer does not need to be running, Ituneshelper./exe is really not neccessary etc...
You can use msconfig to see what gets loaded at startup and try to disable it.
Just be carefull what you disable. always Google the executable name of a process to find out what it is.
Before disabling it.






----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[bcastner]

The file store requirements of System Restore points are completely configurable.

They also have nothing to do with the speed of your XP system.



____________________________
Users Helping Users

 

[vagsk]

Well if you already covered the Spyware problem I think you are OK.

Basically try to reduce the System Restore Points to minimum (about 200MB instead of a percentage of your HDD) and set the option in Internet Explorer not to cache more that say 10-20 MB.

Also I would suggest SpyBot Search and Destoy as another good solution to your spyware potential problem. It does a very good job in searching the registry.

Try disabling the index service if you haven't already done so.
This option is by default active in every system disk in windows XP. All you have to do is right-click on your HDD select properties and unclick the option at the bottom. It will start applying changes to the NTFS volumes untill it reaches system files where it will report inability to change properties. Just click Ignore all and continue. When is done your system will run a bit faster. The reason why index service is slowing done your HDD is because it creates indexes of all your applications for faster searches.

What defrag program are you using? The internal defrag program of windows is a lite edition of diskeeper I think and thus not very good.
Other solutions have a way to defrag System folders, Paging file and Master File Table etc. If you also defrag those then your system is going to speedup even better.

Also if you have being using the system for a while and you made frequent install / unistall operations you might want to consider a program that cleans - up your registry. The registry loads into windows memory and after a while it gets both large in size and fragmented.
Be carefull though because if you crash your registry that's the end for your system. A reformat in almost the only safe way to recover.

One more thing. If you HDD is large enough you could try to divide it into 2 partitions. The first should have the system and the second all the application files that you are using.
This is both good in case you crash your system and you need to reformat but also because the second partition will be slower (because of the physical space that consumes on the Hard disk) for use with your applications (that generally don't require much speed anyway) and the first partition (where the windows related files are) will be faster.

 

[GeminiDaddy]

in the case of itunes helper.exe and all those that you find you can disable - how do you keep them from just starting up again the next time you boot? I guess look for them under services?

Also, can you recommend a good registry cleaner-upper if as you say, the one that ships with windows is only marignal.

pain makes man think. thought makes man wise. wisdom makes life endurable

 

[vacunita]

You can diable them completely from msconfig. just uncheck the entry that corresponds to the executable you want to diable.

I believe Registry Mechanic has good reviews.

----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[Fatboy0341]

Defrag, clean up and run regular maintenence on your system.

I've had the same installation of XP on my system since it came out and it hasn't failed me yet.

Microsoft is guilty of a lot of things but you can't blame lack of PC maintenance on them.

JB



"He who laughs last probably made a backup. He who laughs loudest probably hasn't checked his backups in a while."

 

[linney]

what is 'chckoo'? - " a typing error for Cuckoo?

"can you recommend a good registry cleaner-upper if as you say, the one that ships with windows is only marignal" What would that be that ships with Windows?

The Registry program with the highest recommendations seems to be -

jv16 PowerTools

http://www.macecraft.com/

Which ever registry program you might use it essential to have a good backup of the registry for when things go wrong. This is a life saver -

Registry Backup and Restore for Windows NT/2000/2003/XP

http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/

Testing "Registry Cleaning" Software

http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2005/2005-10-10.htm#1

To check the capabilities of your machine, boot and run it in Safe Mode for a short while. Then ask yourself what am I loading in Normal Mode that I really need on my machine.

FAQ779-4784 may help.

windows XP running very slow
thread779-796508

 

[GeminiDaddy]

thanks all. appreciate all the good info

pain makes man think. thought makes man wise. wisdom makes life endurable