Computer Question

[greekspeedoman]

One of my fav all around cleaning utilities is Ccleaner. It cleans your drive of duplicate drivers & files, wipes the empty space on your drive, & cleans the registry.

A sister program to Ccleaner is Defraggler which is a nice flexible program to defrag your drive & is more through than the stock windows program.

http://www.ccleaner.com/download
http://www.piriform.com/defraggler/download

Both are small programs & both are free.

[WesGrimes]

Wes Grimes: is there a good registry cleaner out there, or in windows xp?

I tried a free one a couple of years ago and I had to take my computer to get it fixed after the cleaner screwed things up. The repair shop told me never to try to clean the registry in windows xp.

I've read a lot of comments like this:

Don’t…I’ve “experimented” with a variety of registry cleaners including ccleaner and though in most cases any damage could be reversed, in my last “experiment” it failed miserably and windows was totally trashed. Well not totally I could still boot but it was full of errors that only got worse as I attempted fixes. Ended up buying a new drive, restoring from my original restore CD and then installing only minimal programs. I kept the old drive to access data as I needed it. I must say things run fast now. Now that is a good registry cleaner ;-)

---------------

CF, all computers slow down as we add stuff to them. They just have to handle more crap we stick on it......

I defrag about once a week... the longer you let it go, the more work the computer has to do to get things back together....

I would never trust a registry cleaner from any company. The big impact clean up of the registry is accomplished using the msconfig steps above.

The whole concept of a registry cleaner is really pretty scary. It is looking through the registry a randomly deleting what it thinks is not needed. I am a programmer, and shudder at the thought of a program deleting my registry entries without knowing why I put them there. Many programs may stop functioning after such an evasive maneuver. Besides, a dirty registry does not slow the computer down. Having too many programs launch automatically does.

One other point of note is what is refereed to as "OS Corruption". The concept behind this is that over time system files are slightly damaged, settings are changed away from the factory defaults, and other related bad things. The solution is that if you reload the OS on a 5 year old computer that has been used on a regular basis, the computer will run substantially faster after the rebuild. There is no substitution for a clean load every few years. It is painful, but worth it...

Thanks,
Wes

[Classic Finn]

Wes Grimes: is there a good registry cleaner out there, or in windows xp?

I tried a free one a couple of years ago and I had to take my computer to get it fixed after the cleaner screwed things up. The repair shop told me never to try to clean the registry in windows xp.

I've read a lot of comments like this:

Don’t…I’ve “experimented” with a variety of registry cleaners including ccleaner and though in most cases any damage could be reversed, in my last “experiment” it failed miserably and windows was totally trashed. Well not totally I could still boot but it was full of errors that only got worse as I attempted fixes. Ended up buying a new drive, restoring from my original restore CD and then installing only minimal programs. I kept the old drive to access data as I needed it. I must say things run fast now. Now that is a good registry cleaner ;-)

---------------

CF, all computers slow down as we add stuff to them. They just have to handle more crap we stick on it......

I defrag about once a week... the longer you let it go, the more work the computer has to do to get things back together....

I would never trust a registry cleaner from any company. The big impact clean up of the registry is accomplished using the msconfig steps above.

The whole concept of a registry cleaner is really pretty scary. It is looking through the registry a randomly deleting what it thinks is not needed. I am a programmer, and shudder at the thought of a program deleting my registry entries without knowing why I put them there. Many programs may stop functioning after such an evasive maneuver. Besides, a dirty registry does not slow the computer down. Having too many programs launch automatically does.

One other point of note is what is refereed to as "OS Corruption". The concept behind this is that over time system files are slightly damaged, settings are changed away from the factory defaults, and other related bad things. The solution is that if you reload the OS on a 5 year old computer that has been used on a regular basis, the computer will run substantially faster after the rebuild. There is no substitution for a clean load every few years. It is painful, but worth it...

Thanks,
Wes

Wes, You mention to reload the OS on a 5 year old computer, Ours is just that. How is this done? You do have a very good point. A Fujitsu Siemens
Amilio Labtop.

regards

Classic Finn

[WesGrimes]

It should have come with a restore disk. You put that in and run it. It should guide you the rest of the way.

BEWARE, this will restore to out of the box condition. All data will be destroyed, including any programs like Photoshop or Office that you may have installed. This is not for the faint of heart, and might be worth taking to the shop if you are interested in doing it. Be careful not to pay too much, and you can buy a $400 laptop now that will blow away any 5 year old laptop. Computers age like dogs...

[Classic Finn]

It should have come with a restore disk. You put that in and run it. It should guide you the rest of the way.

BEWARE, this will restore to out of the box condition. All data will be destroyed, including any programs like Photoshop or Office that you may have installed. This is not for the faint of heart, and might be worth taking to the shop if you are interested in doing it. Be careful not to pay too much, and you can buy a $400 laptop now that will blow away any 5 year old laptop. Computers age like dogs...

The new ones are fairly reasonable here as well even though everything costs double here in Finland as compared to the USA. I know for a fact that Im not experienced with computers enough to start playing in depth. When we,ll be able to buy a new one is beyond me but hope this one will keep going till the right time arrives if there is such a thing

But Wes thank you for your advice and teachings.

Classic Finn

[ZippyTheTurtle]

Another culprit is actually hardware overheating which can cause the computer to slow down to a crawl as well. My parent's HP computer had all of it's air holes coated in dust.

While I was visiting one day they mentioned they needed a new computer and wanted recommendations. My parents aren't power users so I had to wonder what application they were suddenly running that caused the computer to seem slow?

My first thought was my nieces probably loaded it up with malware from browsing the internet with no concern for where they went.

I had my parents clean the air holes of the computer. Before I left that day I kicked off the defrag program provided with Windows thinking if this doesn't fix it should be a good start.

I finally after ruling out everything else had an a-ha moment and thought to check their CPU and the heatsink was so caked with dust that the heatsink was doing the reverse of it's job and retaining rather than dispersing heat.

Told my parents that it was going to be touch and go. Kind of like a person who gets a severe fever as a child. Might come through with no problems. Might still be broken. Might not be quite right the rest of it's life.

I had them leave it powered off to cool down for at least half an hour. A couple hours later my mom turned it on and it was back to screaming like it was new".