Speed Up Your Computer (Easy steps of end of the month maintenance)

NETcessities ^ | March 31, 2005 | NETcessities

[BJungNan]

So Your Computer is Running Slow
When you first bought your computer, it zinged. It was faster than the computer you replaced. It was "upgraded"! But lately something happened. It slowed to a crawl, taking forever to boot up and net surfing - especially for you dial-up users - became excruciatingly, impossibly slow. It is possible to recapture that lost speed.

What happened? There are a few culprits. We personally hate long winded explanations, so we will keep this short. Or, you can forget the explanations and just skip to the fixes. For those of you still with us, here are the three most common reasons your computer has slowed down. Two deal with slow internet browsing and one is what is causing your computer to take so long to boot up is causing your computer to run slow.

1). You have not cleared out your temporary internet files.
2). You are loaded up with programs in your start menu.
3). You are loaded up with spyware and need to clean it out.

Okay, follow us here and we will take you to the steps and the explanations. Those other guys that jumped ahead are at the same page. But you now know where you are headed.

Run Faster Click Here

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Go here:

Defragmenting Your Pagefile

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

See link at #41!

Has a good procedure!

I have enough memory, I am not sure the Swap ever happens.

[Brad’s Gramma]

BTTT....thank you.

[RedBloodedAmerican]

Yea you can move it and move it back, that will do it if you have a partition, or enable the group policy in the settings in admin control panel. If you delete it altogether it might slow the pc way down until you re-create it and boot again. But that defrag file I linked above works nice, very small, very quick. and no spyware!
one way to keep it from getting defragged as easily, and msdn and technet suggest is to make the min and max size of the file the same size, typically 1.5x the size or amount of physical ram.

[KoRn]

Thats a very good thing to do!

A program I like to use to speed things up is Norton Win Doctor, its within the Norton Utilities Suite. It makes Windows run very fast after using it. Win Doctor scans your Windows Installation for things that tend to slow it down, like broken shortcuts, registry problems, and much much more. After it finds problems in Windows it applies fixes to them as well.

[amigatec]

You Winders People KILL me! :-)

I have to agree, when I switched to Linux I quit working ON my PC and started working WITH my PC!!

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Ain't that the truth!

Running Xandros V3 here.....know very little really about linux.

[hiredhand]

I have to agree, when I switched to Linux I quit working ON my PC and started working WITH my PC!!

Yep! That's about the way it works too! I've been running FreeBSD as a desktop OS (with KDE on top), but used to run RedHat Linux. I wouldn't recommend FreeBSD as a desktop OS. It "can" be trouble. It's a GREAT server OS! I'm thinking about moving it all back over to Debian. :-)

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

From the link at post #41:

******************************************

Freeware alternative
2004-11-24 11:18:54  ecloninger [Reply | View]

There is a freeware pagefile defragmenter available at www.sysinternals.com. I've been using it for several years on NT/2000/XP with no problems. It does not require you to turn off virtual memory and it does it's job requiring only one reboot.

• Freeware alternative
  2005-03-07 01:10:29  ortegos [Reply | View]
  
  Yes, it's very good programm. I am also recommend it.
  

[onyx]

Thank you.
I'll keep that link.

[Prophet in the wilderness]

Do a web search for : TCP Optimizer.
It's a program that optimizes your PC and network cards.
My mom has a V 90 modem and after I used it on her computer she can get 50 K on her dail up.

[KoRn]

Just curious as to why one would want to defrag their page file when it can simply be deleted and rebuilt? In Windows XP the page file can't be deleted directly from Windows because it will give the "in use" error.

I always delete mine from my Windows PE(variant) CD.

For info on how to make this CD, go here:Bart's PE Builder

This is an amazing tool. I refer to it as my 'magic disk'. It can be used for disaster recovery to rescue files from a system that won't boot. It's pretty much a Windows XP 'Live CD' similar to Knoppix in the Linux world, and it has full USB and Network Support. You can boot from this CD into a minimal Windows XP Installation where you can access all Windows partitions and the files that are on them. With this CD there is no computer you can't get into as long as you have physical access and a CDROM.

[Prophet in the wilderness]

You can still get DSL through your phone lines ( if it supports DSL ) but, the DSL company has to do a " LINE TEST " to see if your phone lines are capable for DSL.

[Prophet in the wilderness]

Also, ( if you don't have it already ) try using Firefox ( Mozilla ) browser, it seems to run faster and the web pages load up faster than MS Internet Explorer.

[brityank]

Check your clock. Your PC clock is six minutes slow.

[hiredhand]

Check your clock. Your PC clock is six minutes slow.

Oh hey! There is a 6 minute difference between my workstation and FR! :-)

I just checked three machines at the site here and they're all the same...and they're all slaved from one of the US Navy time servers....so USN NTP servers might be off, but I doubt it. :-)

Either way...you've got a good eye. :-)

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Very interesting!

[Brad’s Gramma]

Yo. Mr. Doombringer. If you're here...Gramps is having trouble w/his computer.

When he tries to open a Word Doc, Word files....he's getting an error message saying he doesn't have enough memory. He closed out all of his open programs, did a defrag, rebooted, disk clean-up and still has the problem.

Would you be so kind as to H-E-L-P???

(or anyone who knows......)

Thankin' Ye!

[blam]

Hey thanks, it helped.

[D-fendr]

Been there. Phone company put a "load" on the local line, helped a bit, but got the same answer about what the max they were required to deliver.

I had to have more bw for work, broke down and got ISDN. It's expensive and was a bit of a pain to do mostly myself.

So: if you got cable or DSL coming soon, wait - bear in mind that providers are notorious for saying "we'll have service out there in a few months" when it's not true.

ISDN is not much speed for the buck - 128k, but it was still cheaper than satellite and I was maxed out in budget. ISDN is quite stable and reliable for me. You also get a phone line (though bw is cut if you use it while surfing.)

good luck..