Help me wake up my XP machine.

September 4, 2006 11:43 PM

How can I "clean" my PC as thoroughly as possible without formatting?

My computer's performance should (I think) be better than it is. I have a XP Home desktop PC, 2.6 GHz procesor, 1.5 Gigs RAM, multiple hard drives totalling 120 Gigs storage. Not top of the line, but not too shabby, and the hang ups and lags--especially the boot up lag--are getting a little ridiculous.

Every now and then I will format my C: drive to "clean house" and have my machine run smoother and better. Maybe it's laziness, but I'd like to do everything possible short of a format to improve performance (and space, though on my C drive that's not really an issue).

I have a defrag app I run occasionally, as well as an app that will check for errors in the registry, find missing files, delete unneeded ones, etc (I'm away from my 'puter now and can't recall the name). I also do the requisite spy/malware scans and purges, and maintain a good antivirus.

So, what can I do to improve performance? I've tried some XP tweaks but didn't notice any real improvement. Any ideas?

posted by zardoz to computers & internet (9 comments total)

That's not too different to my other machine - 2.6G Athlon, 512M RAM, a few 100G of HD, Win2k, etc. Your general housekeeping sounds pretty good - the only thing I'd suggest is running PageDefrag at boot.

Note that most A/V programs will slow things down considerably, especially at boot time. Avast! seems to do this less than most.
posted by Pinback at 12:22 AM on September 5, 2006

Get rid of unnecessary services, filetypes, fonts, applications and anything else you can think of. If you're not averse to pay software, XPLite will automate a bunch of these steps.

Look at all that junk in the system tray. Can you disable some of it? Now do the same thing with the Task Manager (be prepared to do a little research, lest you get rid of something you need).

Check into the specifics of your paging file(s). Too small, too big, on the non-ideal drive. Speaking of that, the drive w/the OS on it is the fastest one, right?
posted by box at 5:05 AM on September 5, 2006

In addition to the above comments, defrag the drives, run a spy-ware removal tool of your choice, run a virus scan, and a reg-cleaner program. Also delete all temp files created by IE or other such programs.
posted by slimepuppy at 6:18 AM on September 5, 2006

I forgot to mention checking (and disabling or uninstalling, if possible) the things that run on startup. Again, good tweak programs automate a lot of these steps.
posted by box at 8:51 AM on September 5, 2006

Do you guys have recommendations for these kinds of programs? A registry cleaning program, or a start-up disabling program?
posted by stratastar at 9:14 AM on September 5, 2006

CCleaner will clean out your temp files, programs (such as temp files from Photoshop and many others) and a registry cleaner.

For a start-up disabler, just go to Start-Run-MSConfig. You want the Startup tab. If you don't know what it is, don't disable it (google all the things listed there), but things like an Office auto-starter, you can turn off.

Or, get Startup Inspector.
posted by IndigoRain at 9:29 AM on September 5, 2006

stratastar, Mike Lin's startup control panel works well or if you have Spybot S&D under the tools section there is a option to turn off programs that run at startup.
posted by squeak at 10:26 AM on September 5, 2006

You can make the reformat/reinstall process much less painful with unattended install scripts.
posted by Chuckles at 4:16 PM on September 5, 2006

Thanks everyone, for the help! I disabled some startup items, and the big thing seemed to be a page file defrag like Pinback suggested. It's not perfect, but it's better than before!
posted by zardoz at 5:57 PM on September 6, 2006