Cleaning/Speeding Up Computer

Pig Cat

Pig Cat

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I've seen a few products you can buy that claim they can speed up your computer. Are any of these actually worth owning or are there things you can do for free that are just as effective?
 
Pig Cat said:
I've seen a few products you can buy that claim they can speed up your computer. Are any of these actually worth owning or are there things you can do for free that are just as effective?
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I keep all photo's, music and films on a 1TBt. USB external hard drive
cheers Danny
 
Doctor Beaker said:
Pig Cat said:
I've seen a few products you can buy that claim they can speed up your computer. Are any of these actually worth owning or are there things you can do for free that are just as effective?
Click to expand...

I keep all photo's, music and films on a 1TBt. USB external hard drive
cheers Danny
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I didn't think the amount stored on the hard drive made any difference to PC speed. Isn't it the other kind of memory that is used to run it? Something to do with ROM and RAM - you see, I have veeeery basic knowledge about this sort of thing.
 
In windows it's usually all the programs you have running in the background combined with any security packages which constantly scan everything you open or view on the web for viruses, malware, ad blocking, etc. which gradually slow it all down. There are a lot of potentially dodgy programs advertised on web adverts that claim to improve performance. Personally, and this is a pain in the arse but works, a reinstall every few years works well save for having to reinstall all your programs and download all the updates again. Try some well known paid-for programs and let them do their thing to clean up the registry etc. Removing any browser toolbars helps as does disabling any of the manufacturer-supplied crap that comes pre-installed when you buy a machine. Moving videos etc to another drive doesn't really make any difference.
Not preaching here as it brings its own problems but I moved away from Windows to Linux for this reason
 
none worth paying for.


if you are using a hard drive then there is a couple tools you can use

one of the easiest to use is called "smart defrag 2"
from iobit

ive noticed speedup's on mine and 5 or 6 family members pc's ive installed it on
 
I have tried them all, XP, Vista, Win 7, I now run Puppy Linux from a USB stick drive and use the hard drive for storage, critical stuff is on an external USB hard drive. Linux makes Windows look like a slow Loris, plus there are no issues with viruses, I don't even have any antivirus software installed.
 
Me too, with mint 9 on a little netbook it just flies. Can't get printer working with it but it's Brother who have no driver (tried similar drivers but all I get is a permanent 'reading data's on printer display.

Defragging performance improvement is probably more noticeable on old fat 32 file systems. A clean of the registry will probably help - out of the loop on windows software but try www.freewarefiles.com - free and not trial software, no spyware. Some but not most software there might ask you to install a browser search bar but you can untick the option.
 
Blimey, I wouldn't even know where to start moving over to Linux. I think I'll leave it for the moment. Looks like there aren't any simple quick fixes. I also think I might be blaming a slowish broadband speed on my computer, but presumably the pc is not to blame for that, just our country's lack of decent phone technology.
 
I am having problems with printing as well, had it working now it wont. I have to laugh about England's phone technology, when I moved into my flat I had terrible speed issues with broadband, BT came out in the end as it turned out to be a line issue, whilst chatting to the engineer I mentioned the BT infinity fibre optic service, he told me that the speed on fibre optic would fly 'to the box' meaning the green box in the street, but would still rely on the old twisted pair from the telegraph pole to the house, it's a bit like doing 100 MPH down a 1000 lane freeway to hit a 2 lane bottleneck at the end.
 
osdset said:
I am having problems with printing as well, had it working now it wont. I have to laugh about England's phone technology, when I moved into my flat I had terrible speed issues with broadband, BT came out in the end as it turned out to be a line issue, whilst chatting to the engineer I mentioned the BT infinity fibre optic service, he told me that the speed on fibre optic would fly 'to the box' meaning the green box in the street, but would still rely on the old twisted pair from the telegraph pole to the house, it's a bit like doing 100 MPH down a 1000 lane freeway to hit a 2 lane bottleneck at the end.
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Yes - it uses VDSL2+ for that short stretch... something that in 2005 in Stockholm I witnessed running on a 1940s/1950s local loop of copper - complete with the repairs and joints made over the interim 50 years - at 230-240Mbit/sec... BT currently limit it to ~40Mbit/sec though (though they have trials for 80Mbit/sec). The local loop would be no more than 300-400yards (rather than up to 6 miles now in some cases) so the speed drop off with distance would be minimal anyway.

Now I need to go lie down - that was almost a defence of BT, something that doesn't come easily to me.
 
defragging can help a bit, so can a registry cleaner.
Most problems are caused by excessive programs starting on boot up of windows. Get a decent startup manager (Glarys utils has one included and is free) and turn off anything that you do not need - it won't stop any of those programs from functioning but will speed you system up.
Pop over to http://www.techsupportalert.com/ where there are great reviews of free software, look in the defrag, registry cleaner and system utils sections and pick one that you like that gets good reviews.

How much RAM have you got on the PC? If its not enough sorting that out will get you a big speed increase for not much £
 
Yes but run something like Belarc Advisor, that'll give you the precise system model of your machine and then you can check on line whether RAM expansion is actually an option.

Check the speed of your connection with any number of online checkers.
 
Not sure what operating system you run now but defragging isn't the issue it used to be years ago. Still worth doing but with the NTFS file system and the SATA ACHI hard disks performing their Native Command Queuing you don't get the noticeable difference you used to.

May want to try CCleaner and use this for cleaning out all the old temporary files and check what is happening in the Startup. You can disable (to check if any issues) or delete (if your sure) from within the same program.

I tend to not perform any registry cleaning as I personally don't believe that this makes a big impact and it's too easy to remove something causing a "broken" windows machine.

Regards,
Geoff
 
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