While professionaly I am strictly a programmer, I used to help diagnose and troubleshoot hardware and software at work and with friends so I’d be glad to help. There are many other reasons your computer can slow down over time, many are not related to viruses. Here are a few things to check that will help speed up any Windows based computer when done every so often.
1.a. If possible, create a system restore ponit before doing the following as a backup. Start->Programs->Accessories->System Tools->System Restore. Hopefully you won’t need it.
1. Most virus scanners do not check for Adware or spyware. I recommend downloading and adding to your arensal a good scanner for those. Adaware and Spyware Sweeper are two good programs to try.
2. Do you have any background programs that shouldn’t be running(most likely stuff in #1). To check, do Start->Run->msconfig.exe. Go to the Services tab, check the box at the bottom to Hide all Microsoft Services, and look at the remaining list. Are there any odd names in there you don’t recognize? Google them, usually you can find out what it is for and if it is a valid service. If it isn’t uncheck it.
Now go to the startup tab, stuff on this tab can significantly slow down your startup and runtime since these are your the background programs running in the taskbar. Again, if any of the names look odd google them. Also, a lot of these are worthless to run all the time so uncheck any you don’t really use but just let sit(except for virus scanners and what not, be cautious when removing them as some are also for sound and video drivers)
3. Do you have any files on your desktop (not shourtcuts with the little arrow in corner of icon, but actual files or movies). If so, anything larger than a couple K can slow down loads whenever it has to refresh or display the background. A good alternative is to create a folder and move all those files into their and then have a shortcut to that folder on the desktop. I had a friend who had multiple 3gb movie files on his computer, you would not believe how slow it was because of this.
4. Clean out your temp files. These are copies or blocks of files pre-loaded for programs to load and run. Usually developers don’t write code to clean these up so they just sit behind and take up space and make looking for valid ones take longer since it has to sort through a growing list. You would not believe how big these folders can get. I cleaned out one lady’s laptop that had 10gb of temp files just bloating her computer. Currently, my temp folder has 1gb of files. These files can be found in C:\Windows\Temp. Before deleting these, close down any programs that might be using them. Don’t worry, they’ll reload the ones needed next time you load the program.
5. Clean out your internet history of files and images as well. This will bloat it the same way #4 does. You can easily remove these using your browser settings.
6. Make sure your harddrive itself isn’t the issue. Start->Run-Cmd.exe type in chkdsk /f /r
This will scan your harddrive blocks and fix any errors it finds (/f) . THe /r will locate bad sectors and try and recover readable information. If you have a large block of bad clusters that are unfixable, it is time for a new hard drive.
7. Defrag your computer. If you don’t know what this does, it will rearrange your files so that related blocks of information are moved to adjacent or as close to adjacent memory blocks as possible. This will significantly speed up load times if a file is badly fragmented. Fragmenting happens over time when files are created and removed. This one I would recommend doing once a month, or if you install/remove lots of programs I would do it more frequently. Do this one after you have deleted temp files and moved files from your desktop into a folder. Start->Programs->Accessories->System Tools->Disk Defragmenter. This I would recommend running at night as it could take many hours or more if its badly fragmented(I fixed one with 47% fragmentation). Be sure to turn off standby modes, and if possible run this in Safe Mode for the best result. To run in safe mode, restart your computer, right after the beep and BIOS information is posted, press F8 to load the Windows bootup menu. Selet Startup mode. Also disable virus scanner when defragging.
8.Remember to clean out your recycling bin once you check that everything is working correctly.
9. Check how much hard drive space you have free in your drive. I would make sure to always have a few Gigabytes free for virtual memory used when loading programs. If you don’t have at least a few gb’s its time to start removing stuff or get a bigger hard drive. If you have an additional drive, you can make the other drive usable for virtual memory instead of the one the OS is on.
If you have any questions I’d be glad to help.
Happy New Year,
Eric
-- - Eric Noblesville, IN
