I computer has slowed to a crawl. Any tips on speeding it up? What I’ve done so far is free up some disc space by deleting some programs and emptying the recycle basket. I’ve also run the native disc cleanup program.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks

pesce.del.giorno said:

I computer has slowed to a crawl. Any tips on speeding it up? What I’ve done so far is free up some disc space by deleting some programs and emptying the recycle basket. I’ve also run the native disc cleanup program.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks

Check for running processes. Hidden or otherwise. ie: turn some stuff off. Empty browser caches and histories. Stuff like that.

Cheers. How do I do that? My understanding of computers and such is rudimentary.

pesce.del.giorno said:

Cheers. How do I do that? My understanding of computers and such is rudimentary.

Depends a little on which operating system you are running. Show running processes or show background processes are common system commands.

Repairing permissions also helps. There are smart applications which can do all the system cleaning and maintenance as well as cleaning up browser and application caches.

try ccleaner

ccleaner

CrazyNeutrino said:

try ccleaner

ccleaner

That’s the one I use. It works.
After cleaning I then run defrag.

CrazyNeutrino said:

try ccleaner

ccleaner

Thanks for that. There are various cleanup programs being offered free of charge but I was reluctant to risk them for fear of collecting more garbage. ccleaner is OK?

pesce.del.giorno said:

CrazyNeutrino said:

try ccleaner

ccleaner

Thanks for that. There are various cleanup programs being offered free of charge but I was reluctant to risk them for fear of collecting more garbage. ccleaner is OK?

there is a free version

the paid version has an auto update feature

A good malware program might help too

try spybot

Spybot

ccleaner is excellent.

jjjust moi said:

ccleaner is excellent.

On the Mac I use OnyX. Though the system can perform all of this via the Disk Utility or the Terminal.

if you try cleaner

make you look at the settings to which things it will delete

like cookies and internet history etc

jjjust moi said:

ccleaner is excellent.

This morning I used the Windows clean up tool then immediately after I ran cclean & it removed a further 5MB of junk.

Tamb said:

jjjust moi said:

ccleaner is excellent.

This morning I used the Windows clean up tool then immediately after I ran cclean & it removed a further 5MB of junk.

Weak. Just removed 2.5GB!

My computer was running slower and slower, for a few years. I tried all that and lots of anti-viral stuff, too. All sorts of other stuff was said – including Windows collects junk and gets slower with time, etc. It took up to 20 minutes to bring up the shut down splash screen, to give you an idea how slow it was.

Recently it became unbearable – asking it to do anything would freeze the computer for ages and ages – necessitating a forced re-start several times a day. I followed FSM’s advice and got a new Solid State Drive.

It is now just like it was when I bought it.

It turns out the Hard Disk was slowly becoming fnerked, and access had become unbelievably slow. Some data on the hard drive was lost, unfortunately. That’s how close it was to becoming a complete failure.

poikilotherm said:

Tamb said:

jjjust moi said:

ccleaner is excellent.

This morning I used the Windows clean up tool then immediately after I ran cclean & it removed a further 5MB of junk.

Weak. Just removed 2.5GB!

ITYM pftfweka. IIRC I removed 4 but that was on an ancient lappy…

Michael V said:

My computer was running slower and slower, for a few years. I tried all that and lots of anti-viral stuff, too. All sorts of other stuff was said – including Windows collects junk and gets slower with time, etc. It took up to 20 minutes to bring up the shut down splash screen, to give you an idea how slow it was.

Recently it became unbearable – asking it to do anything would freeze the computer for ages and ages – necessitating a forced re-start several times a day. I followed FSM’s advice and got a new Solid State Drive.

It is now just like it was when I bought it.

It turns out the Hard Disk was slowly becoming fnerked, and access had become unbelievably slow. Some data on the hard drive was lost, unfortunately. That’s how close it was to becoming a complete failure.

Apart from the computer going very slow, the key indicator of impending HDD doom was that the HDD access light was almost constantly on. It now flashes occasionally.

Think you can test HD read and write speeds and errors.

Bang in some more ram maybe.

pesce.del.giorno said:

Cheers. How do I do that? My understanding of computers and such is rudimentary.

Right-click your taskbar (the bar at the bottom of the screen), select Task Manager, processes. It will show you what processes are currently active on your machine and how much CPU, Memory & Disk they’re eating up.

you could give it a spin in safe mode too see if it burns rubber.

transition said:

you could give it a spin in safe mode too see if it burns rubber.

Yes. There’s lots of things to suggest but considering that the victim is already floundering, no need to confuse the uninitiated.

fdisk

Tamb said:

CrazyNeutrino said:

try ccleaner

ccleaner

That’s the one I use. It works.
After cleaning I then run defrag.

Yes, ccleaner is excellent. It’s also good at cleaning up obsolete entries in the registry.

You probably don’t need to defrag your hard drive regularly. It was a necessity in the early days of Windows, when drives were formatted with the FAT file system, but modern versions of Windows use the NTFS file system which can cope with fragmented files without it having a noticeable effect on speed unless the drive is severely fragmented and almost full.

Defragging a drive involves a lot of reading & writing to the drive. So defragging regularly puts unnecessary wear & tear on the drive. And if you have a power failure while defragging you risk corrupting the file system.

The FAT file system is still used today – it’s still a good choice for USB flash drives; OTOH, defragging a flash drive is a Bad Idea, since it causes a lot of wear & tear on the drive – it’s much better to copy the files to your hard drive, do a quick format of the flash drive, and then copy the files back.

…

CrazyNeutrino said:

if you try cleaner

make you look at the settings to which things it will delete

like cookies and internet history etc

Fair point. Cookies shouldn’t be a big deal – websites will just issue you fresh cookies, and losing cookies shgouldn’t cause you to lose anything important on a properly-coded site. Losing your internet history can be more annoying, since you will no longer be easily able to see what links you clicked on before the history was lost. OTOH, internet history can take up a lot of space on your hard drive, and a huge internet history cache may slow down your browser &/or cause it to behave strangely (eg not mark links as already visited).

IIRC, with the default settings of ccleaner you don’t lose things like passwords, but I don’t remember if it also preserves stuff like other autocompletion data for Web forms.

…

Michael V said:

My computer was running slower and slower, for a few years.

[…]

It turns out the Hard Disk was slowly becoming fnerked, and access had become unbelievably slow. Some data on the hard drive was lost, unfortunately. That’s how close it was to becoming a complete failure.

Yeah, a dying drive will certainly slow things down! :)

Sometimes a browser can use a lot of resources.

My Firefox doesn’t get on well with Adobe Flash. I sometimes had to wait minutes to load a page. Disabling Flash appears to have solved the problem. You can have Firefox ask to enable it if necessary.

rumpole said:

Sometimes a browser can use a lot of resources.

My Firefox doesn’t get on well with Adobe Flash. I sometimes had to wait minutes to load a page. Disabling Flash appears to have solved the problem. You can have Firefox ask to enable it if necessary.

yeah, My Firefox does not close properly when flash is running

have to manully force firefox to close using taskmanager
flash processes running get closed as well