Re: Extremely slow response

Tech-Archive recommends: Repair Windows Errors & Optimize Windows Performance

On Sun, 17 May 2009 09:28:06 -0700, Jack Leach <dymondjack at hot mail
dot com> wrote:

Thanks for the clarification Ken.


You're welcome. Glad to help.



I had thought that the amount of programs installed might be a performance
issue on a machine with limited resources (e.g. fairly full hard drive or low
amounts of ram),


Yes, it could be an issue if you need a page file, and you don't have
enough disk space for one that's big enough. Or if you don't have
enough disk space, you can't defrag. But these are highly specialized
situations, not general ones. As a general rule, how much or what you
have on the disk drive has no effect on performance.



and I should have mentioned to check for *intensive usage*
programs in the background that may not be required.


Yes, whether in the foreground or background, anything you are running
that uses substantial computer resources will hurt performance. And if
it's something that you don't need, it's clearly a waste.



"Ken Blake, MVP" wrote:

On Sun, 17 May 2009 02:59:08 -0700, Jack Leach <dymondjack at hot mail
dot com> wrote:

If you are talking about overall performance and not startup performance,
here's the steps I would usually take in such a scencario (not necessarily in
this order...):

- Add/Remove Programs. Go through this list and get rid of anything that's
not essential. Lots of people wind up with more programs in here that do
absolutely nothing for them than programs that they actually use.


This is not correct. What programs are installed, or even whether
something is installed that is never used, has *nothing* to do with
performance. Good or bad performance is the results of what's running,
not what's installed.


- Minimize the amount of programs running on startup or in the background.
Especially programs on startup, again alots of people have these programs
taking up startup performance and resources without any requirement.


The *number* of programs that start automatically or run in the
background is not the issue. Despite what many people tell you, you
should be concerned, not with how *many* of these programs you run,
but *which*. Some of them can hurt performance severely, but others
have no effect on performance.

Don't just stop programs from running willy-nilly. What you should do
is determine what each program is, what its value is to you, and what
the cost in performance is of its running all the time. You can try
google searches and ask about specifics here.

Once you have that information, you can make an intelligent informed
decision about what you want to keep and what you want to get rid of.




- Disk Cleanup/Defragment


These are certainly good to do, but defragmenting is considerably less
important than it was back in the days of Windows 9X.


- Security and Restore Points. Depending on how comfortable you (your
friend) is with not having restore points, apparently there can be a lot of
performance gained by turning these features off. This goes for any
'hybernation' modes as well, as the system creates images at a fairly regular
interval.


I strongly disagree. A restore point is normally created once a day.
Yes, that will use computer resources while it's running, but it
doesn't take very long, so its impact is very slight. Moreover,
creation of a restore point is only done when nothing else is going
on.



Disclaimer - I only sort of know what I'm talking about, so swallow this
with some salt :)

Regular defragmentation, keeping useless programs uninstalled and keeping
the background processes to a minimum seem to be the biggest players.


Once again, I disagree with all three of those points.


"bm" wrote:

A neighbour asked me to help him with his very slow response computer.
I started by doing a disk clean up followed by getting rid of programmes
which were opening every time he started his PC
This gave some improvement but the system is still dreadfully slow.
What further steps can I take to improve this?
Blair




--
Ken Blake, Microsoft MVP - Windows Desktop Experience
Please Reply to the Newsgroup


--
Ken Blake, Microsoft MVP - Windows Desktop Experience
Please Reply to the Newsgroup
.

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