My pc is old and gotten very sluggish. What can I do? Besides replacement. nt

[rhett o rick]

[CK_John]

1. Bump the memory to the max for that machine. Here is a link I use and have good service,

memoryx:
<http://www.memoryx.net/>

Meanwhile run disk cleanup, and defrag your hard drive from Programs->accessories->system tools.

[rhett o rick]

3. Thanks. I have defrag'ed frequentely. I will look into adding memory. nt

[CK_John]

4. Don't forget the cleanup it is more important. Not knowing OS or your skill level

there are other very good tools to keep your system tuned, such as Ccleaner that I would suggest for you to clean your registry and startup bloat that steals ram and only saves seconds.

Overly frequent defrag puts a lot of strain on hard drive. Also HD should have at least 1/3 free space of total volume.

[rhett o rick]

6. what is clean up

[CK_John]

8. Programs->accessories->system tools->disk cleanup. n/t

[hobbit709]

2. If it's just slowed down over time

adding memory won't help that much. Windows inherently clutters itself. The only real speedup fix is to reinstall windows.

[BlueJazz]

5. What he said.

:)

[rhett o rick]

7. can you reload windows w/o restoring the whole hard drive? nt

[CK_John]

9. Take care of memory first. Do you know current memory and did you check for the max?

Don't wreck your system unless you have backed up your data files and have a recovery plan. Personally restoreing a system is only for a failed system and usually doesn't improve anthing.

A 19$ memory stick usually doubles the performance of most machine, if not maxed out already.

[hobbit709]

10. If it was running fast new then memory isn't the problem.

Computer memory doesn't slow down as it ages, unlike our own. A XP machine with at least 512Mb RAM runs reasonably well unless you start doing some resource intensive applications. The main problem is that way too much stuff puts itself into the startup-most of which doesn't need to be there. If you remove unnecessary items from the startup(printers are notorious for that) you can speed both bootup and response time considerately.

One of the reason I partition my drives is that I keep absolutely no data on the C: drive.
Whenever my system starts to bog down and the regular disk cleanup and registry fixes don't speed it up that much, I reinstall Windows. It works wonders for bootup and response time.
My main system boots from power on to desktop in about 30 seconds-when it gets much over a minute(about 2 years down the line) I reinstall.

[MyNameGoesHere]

11. I am not sure if I would re-install Windows.

I would equate this to having a car 5 years old that you never tuned up or changed the oil. Would you go to the extreme of changing the engine? I would hope not. As one poster said here add memory, and sure enough it is the absolute BEST no doubt about it bang for the buck to get more out of a system. But do not stop there. Normal system maintenance and a little research will provide you with a abundance of solutions. Uninstall unused programs, use MSCONFIG to control start up programs and services, latest service packs and security updates,Defrag, and CHKDSK after you do all this. I wouldn't be surprised if you got back some of the performance with a little maintenance.

[rhett o rick]

12. thanks i will try that first. nt

[Occulus]

18. Honestly, keep the reinstall in mind.

It really depends entirely on how long it's been since the last hard drive format. Windows has a nasty, nasty habit of fragmenting the file system if you wear the wrong color shirt and don't genuflect properly. If you've installed and uninstalled a lot of programs, yes you can run defrag, and yes that will help, but there are also all those unwanted registry entries that many applications don't get rid of when you uninstall them. More RAM can hide that, to an extent, but the delay and all the extra work for the OS will still be there. You can use a registry cleaner app, maybe, but I tend to shy away from that- the Windows registry can become Black Magic if you don't know exactly what you're doing, and even as an experienced Windows user, I only delve into the registry when I absolutely must, and then only manually. It's too easy to click the wrong button at the wrong time and hose your system with some of the registry cleaning tools I've seen.

I usually format my hard drive twice a year or so, mostly because I'm a gamer and I actually have a need for the machine to run as fast as possible. That includes little things, like keeping my desktop free of all but two or three icons, not allowing unnecessary apps to start at boot time, etc. But if your system has been getting progressively more and more clogged up over time, and you haven't really done anything about it, backing up your data and reformatting the hard drive/reinstalling Windows (or some other OS, like Ubuntu) might actually take less time than fixing what's wrong. If you've been regularly backing up your data, formatting and reinstalling really isn't all that large of a chore. Post-install setup is another story entirely, but even that's a one-time job.

Unless you prepare yourself for it beforehand, reinstalling Windows or Ubuntu or whatever can seem like a panic-button solution, but as long as everything's backed up, it really isn't all that big of a deal- and your system will never run faster than when the drive has just been formatted and the OS reinstalled.

I would dump as much RAM into it as it can handle, though. RAM is practically free at this point, and more is always better.

[pengillian101]

21. That includes little things, like keeping my desktop free of all but two or three icons

Wow - really? It seems odd that little icons on the desktop would make a difference about anything. But, then again, that's why I'm here to learn. My desktop is almost plum full of icon shortcuts.

[DaveJ]

13. Reinstall, IMO

In my experience, it is far easier and faster to plop the CD in an reinstall than to do low level diagnostics. Assuming you have the original CDs, backup your files, reinstall, it's like having a brand new computer. BTW, apparently Win 7 was built for computers with fewer resources so it might even run ok on an older pc. Just a thought.

[CK_John]

14. Win7 requires 1 GB of memory minimum and 2 to be effective. Most older machines have a max of 512 MB

and a Pentium III processor.

[rhett o rick]

16. I dont have cd's but do have the original stuff on the d drive. I can reload it but then I have to

update everything and find some old drivers (like for my scanner) to reload. I can do that just like to try some cleanup first

[Warpy]

15. First, clean house

Delete all the stuff you don't use, files that were vitally important at the time but are now just taking up space, and especially spyware. Clean out your browser caches.

Then defragment the system. Often a defrag will help performance considerably.

Consider putting in some more RAM. That can also speed things up.

Consider downloading Process Explorer, freeware that will help you identify any programs that are resource hogs when your system starts to slow down and suspend them. Windows only allows you to end those programs and sometimes they're critical to the system and you need to reboot. Suspending them allows you to see how the system reacts and restart them quickly if Windows starts feeling queasy.

Finally, if you don't have an AV program, do one of the online scans like Panda to make sure your system isn't running malware that is slowing it down.

[struggle4progress]

17. (1) Increasing memory may be a good option, but it depends on the machine: in one

of my old machines, I could increase memory by a factor of 5.0 at a very reasonable price; in another, with a different type of memory, my only options were to increase memory by a factor of 1.5 or 2.0 -- at a cost of thousands of dollars, which wasn't sensible
(2) If your harddrive is nearly full, you may have some slowdown associated with the slower rw times associated with the later disk sectors: you might get some speedup with a larger harddrive: these are generally available at reasonable price
(3) Lots of us think Windows is bloated: if you aren't tied to Windows-specific applications, consider installing a free linux OS like ubuntu or mint instead of Windows

[paparush]

19. Little Program called RegCleaner

http://www.worldstart.com/weekly-download/archives/reg-cleaner4.3.htm

After installation, go to Tools -->Registry Cleanup --> Do Them All

Let it run.

This will generate a LONG list of orphaned, no longer linked to, registry entries.

Once the list is complete, go to Select -->All
Then click "Remove Selected" in the lower right hand corner.

[Jersey Devil]

20. depends on the processor

My computer is about 5 years old (at least) and still performing very well. It is a Dell Dimension 4600 with Pent 4 (single core), 2.8Gz with 3GB ram, Radeon XL1300 display adapter running Windows 7. Personally I would not try to upgrade anything with less than a P4 processor.

I regularly run (besides virus checks) Malwarebytes to check for spyware and clean out my temp files using CCleaner (free), also using its utility to clean up the registry, do weekly defrags (with Windows) automatically and when I uninstall programs I use Revo Uninstaller (also free) which looks for and deletes leftover files and registry entries usually left behind when you uninstall a program, all things that can slow down a computer.

It's more than adequate for my purposes and I am a heavy app user, with MS Office, Quickbooks, all kinds of video making and editing programs, etc.