Slow PC

[Handy Al]

My PC has gotten slower over the years. I run anti-virus and anti-spyware regularly.
I think it is partially registry bloat.

Anyone recommend a registry cleaner program or any other utility that might help?

Thanks

[DaveS]

Personally, I'd do a flush and fill.

(1) Get a usb hard drive
(2) back up all your important files onto it
(3) re-format the drive (*)
(4) re-install windows
(5) re-install the programs you actually still use
(6) copy your important files back onto your pc
(7) be happy

* - if you don't feel comfortable with this, go buy another internal hard drive - they are dirt cheap these days.

People start out trying to find some quick fix for their slowdown - only to find themselves no better, or perhaps even worse off, after hours of toiling.

[dkerfoot]

Most often it can be blamed on overactive security. McAfee and Norton are notorious for adding more and more "features" every year until your poor PC is slowed to a crawl.

It might be safer for all of us to drive armored cars, but the performance hit would be unacceptable compared to the safety improvement. I have personally seen great performance improvements by removing these super security suites and replacing them with AVG or Kaspersky.

The other big performance hit comes from all the programs that think they need to load every time Windows starts. Google "msconfig" for help on turning the extra crap off.

if you haven't defragmented your hard drive recently, do so.

If you are running Windows XP, make sure you have at least 512MB of RAM. 1GB would be better and is much cheaper than a couple years ago. As the XP service packs and security updates have been rolled out, more memory is needed to maintain the same performance as when new.

Those are the big four, assuming you don't have trojans running that have gotten past our security (a dangerous assumption).

My experience has been that a bloated registry causes some slow down, but nothing compared to the things mentioned above.


A free utility that will clean up your registry (and a ton of other things) is Easy Cleaner by Toni Arts: http://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/ecleane.htm

A better but not free registry cleaner is Registry First Aid: http://www.rosecitysoftware.com/reg1aid/ I have used this for several years. It is very good and not loaded with crapware like many other similar programs.

[Gary Lange]

A lot of times the computer gets things so spread out it has trouble finding them and takes it awhile to sort through the system and hunt all the pieces down. Go into your programs menu and find accessories/System Tools/Defragmentation. However, the first thing to do before this is to put your computer into safe mode then go in and do the above. It will sort out all you files and put them in order so the computer does have to hunt for them. Like others said also Norton mean My computer will be slow!!!! Get rid of Norton if you have it and find another. I run Kaspersky Internet Security and have no problems.