Improving performance of a painfully slow computer

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Improving performance of a painfully slow computer

Published on 20 Feb 2008 at 6:15 pm. 1 Comment.
Filed under TechTips, Gadgets.

My brother Ker sent an email asking for help on improving the performance of his laptop. He’s been using his Asus for almost two years now.

A friend told him: “You need to clear your desktop first.” Ker defended his icon-stricken desktop saying that the desktop is just another folder. Well, yes I agree that it’s another folder (but a special one). But more importantly, a cluttered desktop makes for a cluttered mind.

Anyway, here is my brother’s email cry for help.

To the techies,

My two year old laptop has a Celeron processor and a 40Gb hard drive. It’s running on Windows XP. It has become veeeerrrrrryyyyy slow of late. Sometimes just switching from one window to another takes a long time. I installed Avast anti virus (which, BTW, seems to conflict with my MS Outlook and keeps it from launching) and Comodo firewall, among others.

Windows says I don’t need to defrag yet. Do I understand correctly that reformatting will speed up my computer? Is there a less bloody alternative to that since I don’t know how to do that, I don’t have backups, and I don’t have my XP and Office installers with me now?

And my response on how to help improve performance of his laptop:

Hi Ker,

1.) Restore point
My firstest, (before anything else) advise: Create a restore point so that anything you do below can be restored.

Start > Programs > Accessories > System tools > System Restore

2.) Backup!

It will just be too bad if your laptop dies on you and you don’t have copies of your files.

Get a 2Gb thumbdrive for your backup.

it’s also a good time, kuya, to clean up the house and get rid of old files.

Really, you need to de-clutter your mind, your room and your hard drive. Your productivity will increase when you have less clutter to wade through when doing your work.

3.) uninstall un-used programs.

Start > Control Panel > Add or Remove programs >

Then Unistall the programs you don’t use or you barely use.

4.) Disk cleanup

Start > Accessories > System Tools > Disk cleanup

5.) clean-out your systems tray (next to your clock on the lower right).

There could be as many as 20 programs that are automatically turned on when you start your computer. Many of them are un-necessary. Try identifying some programs which you don’t really need to be on all the time (e.g. YahooMessenger, Adobe Acrobat — can be turned on on demand). When you find one that you don’t use often, right-click the icon, open “options” or “configuration” or anything that allows you to change settings. Look for settings that sound like “start program automatically when omputer starts”. or the like. Un-check that option.

Another way to do this is

Start > Run > (key in “msconfig” and click OK) > Click “Startup” tab

This lists all the additional programs that are run upon startup. There are some apps that you don’t need each and every startup and consume memory resources. Un-check the programs that you could positively identify as un-necessary at startup. For me, I unchecked Google Talk, Adobe, Yahoomessenger, GoogleDesktop. I just open these from Programs when needed.

6.) Defrag especially after deleting/uninstalling above files. Yes, defrag anyway.