Re: Improving Speed and Performance of my computer
- From: "Gerry" <gerry@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2008 12:25:18 -0000
William
I am afraid some of your thoughts are misconceived as others have
pointed out.
WilliamHenry wrote:
I am a total neophyte about tinkering to improve computer
performance, so hopefully the reposnses will include step-by-step
solutions.
I am trying to improve speed and performance on my 5 yr. old Dell
Inspiron 8200 laptop. I'm running Windows XP Professional (2002 ver
w/ Svc Pack 2) with a Pentium 4 processor, 40 GB hard drive and 512
RAM, plus Office XP ver. 2002 as my primary programs. Don't do gaming
or heavy video.
Problem 1 is your 40 gb hard drive. It's too small and possibly has slow
read / write speeds. What is the make and model? Have you considered
replacing? Given your operating system history you would need to
overcome some problems. May not be a cost efficient route.
How much free disk space do you have? Is the hard drive formatted as
NTFS or FAT32? You realistically need 20% or 8 gb free disk space.
I have way too many extraneous programs and drivers apparently
overloading my C drive so that slows it down to a crawl. I want to
move many of these off my C Drive and onto an external 80 GB hard
drive (my F drive). I'm not sure how to do this or how to tell my
systems where to go to look for drivers, etc. once they've been moved
to another hard drive. I want to free up my C dive so that it's
storing only those programs and drivers absolutely necessary for
maximum computer performance given the age of my equipment and
operating system.
Moving drivers is not something you should consider doing. Moving
programmes by uninstalling through Add / Remove Programmes and
reinstalling will not improve performance but it can be done to increase
free disk space but there are other measures which should be tried
first.
Can anyone provide me with extremely basic instructions on how to
speed the computer up to gain greater performance, keeping in mind
that I am totally new to this and do not know much about basic
computer diagnostics.
You have 512 mb RAM. If the Total and Peak Commit Charge in Task Manager
exceeds 512,000 then your system will be using the pagefile, Using the
pagefile is slower than RAM so you need to minimise pagefile usage to
maintain best performance.
Try Ctrl+Alt+Delete to select Task Manager and click the Performance
Tab. Under Commit Charge what is the Total, the Limit and the Peak?
You should be able to gather more information from Task Manager. With
the Processes tab open select View, Select, Columns and check the boxes
before Peak Memory Usage and Virtual Memory size. What are the figures
for the 6 processes using the largest amounts?
Performance is affected by what loads on StartUp so another trick is see
whether any programmes might be better loaded later on demand. Autoruns
is a good tool to check what loads on StartUp.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/ProcessesAndThreads/Autoruns.mspx
With Autoruns you can uncheck an item, which disables it from starting,
or you can can right click an item and then delete it. If you uncheck
you can recheck to re-enable the item. It is a much safer approach than
editing the Registry. Another useful feature of the programme is that
you can right click an item and select Search Online to get information
about the item selected.
The computer was originally purchased from Dell in 2002 and came
preloaded with Windows Me which was for me a disaster. My system has
been upgraded several times, physically by adding RAM memory chips
and by upgrading the OS to Windows XP Prof. (2002 ver), Office XP
Small Business(2002 ver) , etc..
If I move all my data to the external drive and then reinstall from
the disks provided by the manufacturer I'll end up with an inferior
performing OS (Windows Me).. Is there a way to unload my system of
extraneous programs, registry entries, .dll files, etc. that can
speed up its performance without reverting to an ancient and
uniformly regarded unsuccessful OS?
I would not try it given your limited computer skills and the need to go
through the upgrade process and countless Windows update. I would also
leave Office XP in place for the same reason.
I recently reinstalled Windows XP and that seemed to have mild
improvement results, but the problem of too many discarded or
unwanted programs trying to start in the background seems to remain.
I've gone through the START >Control Panel>Add/Remove Programs and
uninstalled anything I knew for sure I didn't want, but that
populated list doesn't begin to show everything on my computer.
When I do a Windows Explorer search and look at my C:\ drive under
Programs I see a whole mess of programs I could probably live without
but I'm concerned that going in and just deleting them won't totally
remove them and will leave commands on my registry that continue to
slow everything down. Many of the programs installed that show up in
my C:\Programs list don't show up on the Add/Remove Programs utility
in Control Panel.
In terms of performance you only need to worry about programmes that
load on StartUp and appear as a process in Task Manager.
Is there a way to improve things without going back to Windows Me?
Forget about that idea.
Many thanks in advance for any help whatsoever.
Some suggestions to increase free disk space on C.
It is likely that an allocation of 12% has been made to System Restore
on your C partition which is over generous. I would reduce it to 700
mb. Right click your My Computer icon on the Desktop and select System
Restore. Place the cursor on your C drive select Settings but this
time find the slider and drag it to the left until it reads 700 mb and
exit. When you get to the Settings screen click on Apply and OK and
exit.
Another default setting on a large drive which could be wasteful is
that for temporary internet files especially if you do not store
offline copies on disk. The default allocation is 3% of drive.
Depending on your attitude to offline copies you could reduce this to
1% or 2%. In Internet Explorer select Tools, Internet Options,
General, Temporary Internet Files, Settings to make the change. At the
same time look at the number of days history is held.
The default allocation for the Recycle Bin is 10 % of drive. Change to
5%, which should be sufficient. In Windows Explorer place the cursor
on your Recycle Bin, right click and select Properties, Global and
move the slider from 10% to 5%. However, try to avoid letting it get
too full as if it is full and you delete a file by mistake it will
bypass the Recycle Bin and be gone for ever.
Select Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Disk CleanUp to
Empty your Recycle Bin and Remove Temporary Internet Files. Also
select Start, All Programs, accessories, System Tools, Disk CleanUp,
More Options, System Restore and remove all but the latest System
Restore point. Run Disk Defragmenter.
--
Hope this helps.
Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
.
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