burbling1

iTrader: (1)

As title. I have had my laptop for about 8 months now and seems to get slower by the day. Can anybody recomend a free program that I can download to clear all the usless stuff from it.
Im not very good on these so please keep it simple
Thanks.

burbling1

iTrader: (1)

Reboot?? It has windows vista .
Startes off with 109gb am useing 62 of them.

Iain Young

You have 109gb of ram?

Vista memory handling works differently to previous versions of the operating system (xp etc). It caches commonly used programs at startup so that they start quicker. If that memory is required by something else, it unloads stuff and makes the memory available to the other program. It's really quite clever stuff, and much more efficient than the memory handling in xp.

So just because it's showing a lot of memory being used at startup, doesn't mean that the memory is not available for other things

spectrum48k

a computer getting slower and slower over time ?

Welcome to Microsoft Windows!

Iain Young

Nowt wrong with windows. The reason these things slow down is because of the shoddy 3rd party rubbish that people install on there. At work I have an XP install which is just as fast now as the day I installed it about 5 years ago, and it's on 24x7....

spectrum48k

I think that's a bit of a sweeping generalisation. I think you can categorise PC's in 2 groups in this example.

1. The works PC which typically doesn't have a large number of apps and a registry and startup group pretty much unaffected.
2. The home PC which is loaded with all sorts, which in my case is games , Microsoft and Adobe products in the main, and its this PC which has noticeably slowed. I wouldn't say I have any "3rd party rubbish"

Besides, what really bothers me is the seemingly lack of evolution concerning hard drives. Thank god things are eventually moving along nicely with SSD's.

Iain Young

Not really. You just proved my point. It's not windows that causes the problems, but the software being installed

Having said that, my home pc hasn;t slowed down noticeably, and you wouldn't believe the amount of stuff I've got installed on that...

bioforger

iTrader: (1)

Got to agree with Iain on this, its usually user error installing poor apps, or a combination of apps which slows Windows OS's down. This is mostly due to defragmentation and ridiculously large registries, all of which sbe maintained at least once a week imo.

My XP box is about 6 yrs old, never been reinstalled, runs just as fast as it did with a fresh install. Well a bit faster now actually due to SP2/3, as I couldn't be arsed to slipstream the SP's into another cd image

spectrum48k

eh? so I just install Windows on its own with no apps, and stand back and admire its performance ?

Surely one way to gauge an OS is to monitor the impact of applications you install into it, and a constant criticism of windows is the more apps you install, the more is creaks and groans. I have a lot of stuff on my Linux install but no apparent slow down?

Iain Young

I have a lot of stuff on my windows install with no apparent slowdown either

The point I was making is that it's not a fault of windows that developers writing software for the system don't know how to create decent code. It's perfectly possible to write installers that don't fragment the registry, and clean up after themselves. It's just most development houses are lazy and don't do this properly.

To us an analogy, you wouldn't blame Subaru for their engine performing badly if Shell produced a duff batch of petrol. Same with windows. Don't blame the OS for the shoddy software being installed

p.s. I have seen similar things happen on Linux (software installs bringing the system to it's knees). It's just that the sandal wearing types tend to be a bit better with their coding techniques than windows developers

burbling1

iTrader: (1)

So how do I get rid of all the unwanted stuff thats slowing it down?

Iain Young

Uninstall any stuff you don't use then run something like ccleaner on it.

bioforger

iTrader: (1)

Then if it's substantially quicker image it with something like ghost. If you get any future issues, simply restore the image. I image on a monthly basis.

burbling1

iTrader: (1)

Image?
not clued up on computers at all sorry.

bioforger

iTrader: (1)

Imaging software makes a complete copy of your harddisc or a partition on your harddisc.

So if anything goes **** up you can restore the image, and your PC will be exactly the same as it was before the issue happened.

For example say your HDD failed, you buy a new HDD, restore the image, then you don't have to reinstall Windows, applications and setup all your settings again.