Ye' old general discussion board. Basically, for everything that isn't covered elsewhere. Come here to shoot the breeze, shoot your mouth off, or whatever suits your fancy. This forum is not for asking programming related questions.
Well I just reformated and I love the feeling of a very clean and fast hard drive with only a few programs... very fast
I run a 80 gigz 7200 Maxtor Hdd
3.0 HT
1024 DDR 400 (single channel)
and in a month from now where I will only have around 50% of my harddrive filled at month, I notice a very large speed reduction. On average I have around 300mb of ram in use at any given idle moment, and 0% CPU usage. I was just wondering what do you guys do to keep your comp running as smooth and fast as possible. BTW, I defrag about once a month and update windows as much as possible
I'm definitely not an authority on the subject or someone with more than a little practical experience outside my own home on the subject. So take that into consideration when reading my advice.
On my primary desktop run winxp. I also run an antivirus & firewall program (norton for both) and update them whenever I can. One thing that I think can help is making all users but "administrator" non-administrators. Then using a non-administrator account to browse the web and chat. When logged on as the non-administrator you can't alter the list of programs set to run at startup without typing in the administrator password. Which of course prevents programs from being set to run at startup without your knowledge. When installing programs from a non-administrator account you just have to right-click and go to "Run As"
-defrag often
-use a memory cleaner (FreeMem Std is good & free)
-use a spyware/adware remover (Adaware is good & free)
-use anti-virus (AVG Antivirus is good & free, but I use Panda which costs $)
-use a firewall (hardware and software...ZoneAlarm for software)
Sami wrote:-defrag often
-use a memory cleaner (FreeMem Std is good & free)
-use a spyware/adware remover (Adaware is good & free)
-use anti-virus (AVG Antivirus is good & free, but I use Panda which costs $)
-use a firewall (hardware and software...ZoneAlarm for software)
might just as well migrate to Linux then. No need for any of that (apart from the firewall, of course).
Sami wrote:I did, but I need Flash/Photoshop so I still use XP a lot.
Why not have a dual-boot?
Thanks for the tips, but im very persistant on my adware/spyware/virusses
I just its just the clutter of things that add up inevetably cause this slowness.. I would expect my specs to handle everything with optimal performance, maybe I should consider getting a 10 000rpm hdd
Phenom wrote:everything with optimal performance, maybe I should consider getting a 10 000rpm hdd
RPM isn't everything. Get a SATA drive, with 8MB cache with 7200 rpm. Fastest HD I've ever put in a computer. I'm using a Seagate (don't remember the model no).
alot of what has already been said as well as removing programs I don't use as that I find takes up real-estate . As well http://www.tweakxp.com has some pretty good suggestions for speeding up your xp based computer.
Last edited by phpScott on Mon Nov 01, 2004 9:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
I have 04 2.8 800mhz bus
1gb dual channel ddr (400)
and one of those nice SATA drives mentioned by patrikg.
I just have to remember to defrag, check spyware and make sure only what i need is running. Works fine then, the hardest part is remembering to defrag.
Thinkpad X30
30GB 7200rpm
768mb RAM
Dual boot
- Suse 9.1, kde 3.3 (95% of the time) - No virus, no spyware, no defrag....
- Win XP (for compatibility issues) - just waking up from SP2.