How to speed up your PC?

[tokyochojin]

My laptop has gone hella slow of late, i've run adware and norton and there's no problems. Can anyone suggest something i could download to speed it up.

Regards,

[SaijoBob]

First thing I always do when my laptop is running like a dog is run cleandisk. If you haven't defragmented your hard drive for a long time that can really slow stuff down.

After that, take a look at what processes are running on your PC. There can be a lot of cr@p running in the background even when you don't need it, like realplayer etc.

I'll hand it over to more techy people now!

[VR46]

as rjwt says defrag, check what processes are running each time you boot, also you got lots of icons on the taskbar at bottom right of your screen ? is your hard drive nearly full ?

[Ish]

When I used Windows on my PCs I used to find that they would steadily slow down over time. I took the blunt hammer approach: I'd reinstall it every 6 months/year.

[marcus]

try typing MSCONFIG into run, and disable the startup items you dont need, which is probably most things exepct systray and antivirus processes.

[Richard.John]

This is a good site if you want to know which processes are safe to kill.

https://www.processlibrary.com

[Nijo]

Reinstall every 6 months is a good plan. A friend of mine even did it every 3 months...

[marcus]

Working on a laptop one thing you could do to make the GUI work better for you is disable all of XPs fancy settings, right click my comp/advanced/performance/adjust for best appearance - or, if you still want the xp look, leave the bottom 3 buttons ticked.

[Corrupt Rose]

My best advice is to break the thing and send it off to an insurance company. I accidently dropped my desktop a while back, due to one of my intermittant tremor attacks in the left hand while carrying the bloody thing.

I send it in with: An XP3000+ processor, 160 gig hard drive and rubbish Motherboard (my RAM and 6800GT survived intact).

It comes back with: An A64-3500+, a 200 gig ATA drive, and a really decent Abit 939 board.

I did phone them to make sure that there wasn't a mistake in all of that, but apparently since I told them I was desperate for it back because of uni work, they just used "the closest like-for-like components they had to hand".

Yikes.

edit - And my old hard drive is still in there, although they've told me there are some bad blocks on it, so format it before using it again.

[anephric]

Working on a laptop one thing you could do to make the GUI work better for you is disable all of XPs fancy settings, right click my comp/advanced/performance/adjust for best appearance - or, if you still want the xp look, leave the bottom 3 buttons ticked.

Ja: sound advice. I freed up plenty clock cycles doing this. Plus get rid of your backdrop, if you've got one.