A Thousand Ways To Speed Up Your Computer!

Solaris

Solaris

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Well, like alot of people I'm sure. As my PC has got older, its got significantly slower. I noticed this with my old PC too until it became so slow it wouldnt load up. Theres a number of reasons, alot are spyware and virus's, and old programs trying to run in the registry.
So with youre help lets compile a big list of tips and software, to get thoose PC's to warp 9!

I'll get the ball rolling:

Spybot - Search and Destroy
Excellant anti Spyware software, which should significantly improve performance, if theres alot of spyware on your Machine.

Kerio Person Firewall
Some decent free Firewall software, but also nice and configarable, it works on my gateway machine, but I've had problems using it on my others, its great all the same though.

Over to you.
 
Trend Micro

The best online scanner i've ever found

AVG Antivirus

Great antivirus program, aswell as free :D

Also, to keep your PC clean and fast, dont install and unistall tons of games and other shit, not that games are shit but just dont install stuff you'll uninstall after a while, this will slow your PC down alot :)
 
all these programs are soo very doo but they cant some tiomes cause mor eharm thatn good. eg u install a virus scanner & adware scaner, both these running in the bacjkground along with how many memory hoggin resources.
The best way to keep ur PC from dying a slow & painful death is to maintain its health, regulary run disk check, defrag ur machine, delete all temp files, delete all fragment5ed files. Make sure u know whats running on startup, start, run msconfig/processes. Once u have all that done & u know whats happening with ur PC.
 
One thing to keep in mind regarding defragging is to do it after running a Disk Cleanup or deleting files.

Maintain cooling (clean fans, exhaust)

Have stable power

Update drivers

Verify hard drive running in DMA mode

Become familiar with your running processes in Task Manager. You'll be able to spot and deal with things like IR4b4dpr0gr4m.exe easier. Also use the sort function to find processes with CPU / memory leaks.

Backup everything and start from scratch every 6 months to a year :)
 
Spyware blaster
Microsoft antispyware beta
Spyware doctor
Crap cleaner
...
 
TechnoHippyChic said:
One thing to keep in mind regarding defragging is to do it after running a Disk Cleanup or deleting files.

Maintain cooling (clean fans, exhaust)

Have stable power

Update drivers

Verify hard drive running in DMA mode

Become familiar with your running processes in Task Manager. You'll be able to spot and deal with things like IR4b4dpr0gr4m.exe easier. Also use the sort function to find processes with CPU / memory leaks.

Backup everything and start from scratch every 6 months to a year :)
Click to expand...

I agree with everythig here apart from "Backup everything and start from scratch every 6 months to a year" I really dont see the need for this, but every-1's PC is a different setup!
 
Oh! Oh!
SpinRite 6.0 is awesome too.
Backup everything and start from scratch every 6 months to a year
Click to expand...
qft
Cleans up junk and any viruses/trojans/worms that you might not have known about and overall improves performance.
 
Hey I have like 3 instances of svc_host running. It's using up a lot of my cpu and I was wondering what to do about it. I think if I remember right it's that big virus that shut down windows but I updated and it doesn't affect me, but still it's running in the background. Is there anything that gets rid of that?
 
It's normal to have loads of instances of svchost.exe running, don't worry about it. It's a legit windows process, not a virus.
 
www.avast.com
It's a good virus scan/protection application, but it uses up quite some system resource so use it only if you have a medium-top of the line computer, otherwise it will lag you to hell.
 
Laivasse said:
It's normal to have loads of instances of svchost.exe running, don't worry about it. It's a legit windows process, not a virus.
Click to expand...

Even if there are about 10 of them running from your current user. It's normal!

Make a seperate partition for windows. 15gb is good. Use the rest to save data on. Games, pictures...anything you don't want erased. This way whenever you want you can delete the windows partition and reinstall it without losing all of your data. Not to mention windows runs better on its own partition...less cluttered.
 
Defragmenting does absolutley nothing.

Best way to speed up your computer by 10 times: reinstall Windows.
 
I've never done a format/re-install of Windows.

My PC is as fast as it was when I made it [few bits have been changed recently, but hey] how do I do it?

Xoftspy for tricky spyware removal.

CCleaner to clean up the registry/etc

bblean for shell replacement, takes up less memory than explorer.exe and doesn't run unless called.

Set your pagefile correctly :)

Use regedit to strip out unwanted crap

Use msconfig regularly to stop anything but the bare essentials starting/set shell correctly among other things.


Above all keep it up :D
 
Disable all the services you don't need to lower ram usage.

This is the best guide ever, but unfortunately the site has been down for a couple of weeks and no word on what's happening. Bookmark it and check back soon:

http://www.blackviper.com/
 
its been down for months.. and i posted a link to a cached version of it in this thread already
 
Badger, do you have a copy of Windows that you bought from like a store or online somewhere? Because if you bought your PC from a store, most likely it's not possible.
 
Buh? My XP is legit - I got it from my work, and I built my computer from scratch :)

The hard drive is about 3 years old :D
 
ComradeBadger said:
Buh? My XP is legit - I got it from my work, and I built my computer from scratch :)

The hard drive is about 3 years old :D
Click to expand...

Just start-up the computer with your Windows CD in the drive and "press a key" to boot from CD. Erase your partitions and reinstall Windows. You may want to backup everything before you do. Add me to MSN or something and I'll go into detail.
 
Periodically empty the Temporary Internet Files folder. Can easily get over 1 GB.
 
dream431ca said:
reformat hard drive.
Click to expand...

My PC is proof that the above is very important...

Never been reformatted and it's slow as poop, even with every other kind of maintenance mentioned in this thread :x
 
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