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Biggest PC slow-downs (other than hardware)?

bigred

Penultimate Amazing
bigred
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OK presuming a "good" system hardware-wise and no viruses (and disregarding which OS you're running, not interested in digressing into another one of those battles) - ie I'm thinking more sort of "maintenance" type things one can do to improve performance.

There are 2 or 3 biggies I can think of offhand:

1 - "Junk" running in the background that isn't really doing anything for you (viewed via Task Manager) ie "pct.exe" and such

2 - Highly fragmented HD

3 - Low on HD space

Others?
 
bigred said:
OK presuming a "good" system hardware-wise and no viruses (and disregarding which OS you're running, not interested in digressing into another one of those battles) - ie I'm thinking more sort of "maintenance" type things one can do to improve performance.

There are 2 or 3 biggies I can think of offhand:

1 - "Junk" running in the background that isn't really doing anything for you (viewed via Task Manager) ie "pct.exe" and such

2 - Highly fragmented HD

3 - Low on HD space

Others?
Click to expand...

Excessive spyware/adware--these will show up in the task manager but may not be obvious.

Tools such as Spybot and Ad-Aware are useful for improving performance under such circumstances.
 
Background indexing from either Google Desktop, MS Desktop, or the Windows file indexing.
Memory resident programs with memory leaks (Yahoo! messenger does this to me).
Large background file copying.
File compression.
 
Windows.

:dl:

But seriously. Scheduled virus scans are a killer. If you can be disciplined enough to do a scan once a week by hand, turn off scheduled scanning. Can't tell you how many times Trena's scanner has started right when she's in the middle of a hot game of Warcraft III. :eye-poppi

Not enough RAM for the OS. I know someone with a 128 MB laptop with... <drum roll> Windows XP! :eek: THAT runs horribly. Plus it has a software modem... so it disconnects alot since the CPU is so busy hitting the page file all the time.

Registry cleaners are allegedly useful. Registry Mechanic is what dad uses. I'm not sure personally.
 
Biggest PC slowdowns? Anything that hogs resources (like Norton, trojans, or viruses), runs in the background (screensavers, startup programs, Windows services), or consumes bandwidth (spyware/scumware).

Sometimes default settings can slow a RAM stressed system. For example, by default ALL the visual effects options are preset in Windows XP. Instead, try:

Start > Right-click on My Computer > Properties > Advanced tab > Performance Settings button > Visual Effects tab > click button next to Adjust for best performance, then scroll down and ensure only the bottom three boxes are checked.

RayG
 
MS Windows - When you see how much snappier and responsive Linux is on the same hardware you wonder what Windows is up to.

Things that I have found to slow down Windows:

Clicking an icon - Maybe it's launching maybe it isn't. Should I click it again or wait. Too long, click again. Great, now I have two copies of Excel running.

Murphy's law - The sooner you need something done the more likely Windows will refuse to cooperate.

Printing - nothing brings a windows box to a crawl faster than clicking print.

Reboots - nothing slows down getting work done like waiting for reboots.

Lost files - Windows apps can be bad for saving files in places where you can't find it again. This is getting better but has a long way to go to be as good as Unix.

Virus scanning - If the system was secure from the ground up we wouldn't have the virus problems we have. Background scanning eats lots of CPU. Luckily we can get dual core processors so that one core can be dedicated to virus scanning. Poor MS that anti-trust thing has almost got them between a rock and a hard place. If they deliver an OS that is very secure then the third party security suppliers will get upset. The whole anti-trust thing was bogus in my opinion.

Honestly I don't find running Windows to be a big hassle. It works, XP is quite stable. I just prefer the *nix way of doing things.

More appropriate to the OP is bad BIOS settings. I have seen a few machines underperform because someone tweaked the BIOS. BIOS tweaks can result in speed when done properly.

Old video drivers can slow things up. Most noticable while playing games.
 
My experience, as a former computer tech, is that the biggest slowdown for most PCs is the loser user sitting in front of it. And the 30 browser toolbars that user installed. And the 3-5 IM clients. And the keyloggers they installed (without knowing it). Beyond that, considering just the hardware and default software, the biggest slowdowns I've seen were the indexing services previously mentioned, insufficient/low-quality RAM, and slow (low RPM) hard drives (slows down virtual memory operations).

And [start flamewar]not being on a Mac[/start flamewar].
 
i know we're not supposed to mention hardware, but not enough memory is a real killer. I used to think 1GB was plenty, but I'm thinking of bumping my mac up to 2GB.
 
As someone already mentioned, turn off all the visual bells and whistles. This frees up memory AND its more efficient.

Also, make sure full video acceleration is enabled (if not, enable it.. if that causes problems, find out why) as well as write combining.

If its an AGP video card, try different AGP aperature sizes (its a bios config option on agp systems) .. usualy smaller is more responsive but for heavy applications (games) then larger is better.

Also if possible, consider overclocking the system bus (not the cpu speed) .. worst case scenario is a ram chip overheats.. best case scenario is that you've improved one of the more common application bottlenecks (memory bandwidth)
 
I have 2 GB of Ram in my laptop (Fujitsu Tablet PC) - but it seems to me the computer never gets anywhere close to using all that (as monitored via the task manager thingy). This is true no matter how much stuff I set running. And sometimes it seems Windows will be using the page file despite having plenty of RAM free. So I wonder if there's any point in having more than 1GB of RAM?
 
Almo said:
But seriously. Scheduled virus scans are a killer. If you can be disciplined enough to do a scan once a week by hand, turn off scheduled scanning. Can't tell you how many times Trena's scanner has started right when she's in the middle of a hot game of Warcraft III. :eye-poppi
Click to expand...
Why doesn't she schedule the scan for some ungodly hour of the morning when she's certain to be asleep?
 
Disk fragmentation is can cause a lot loading lag.

If you are running programs that need to load data regularly or need to load a large chunk of data like graphics-video-games, fragmentation can really have an impact.
 
"Legacy USB" setting in some BIOS systems. If you don't need it, turn it off.
 
rockoon said:
Also, make sure full video acceleration is enabled (if not, enable it.. if that causes problems, find out why) as well as write combining.

Also if possible, consider overclocking the system bus (not the cpu speed) .. worst case scenario is a ram chip overheats.. best case scenario is that you've improved one of the more common application bottlenecks (memory bandwidth)
Click to expand...
I know this will probably draw a little "ire" but can you splain how to do these, or is it too involved to post? (alternatively PM would be appreciate if you're so inclined) Thx

Edit: oh yeah and what about this "indexing" thing y'all speak of....clue in the IT manager who draws comparisons of Dilbert and pointy hair.... :)
 
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