speeding up older computer...

[cheeseman222]

can anyone tell me some ways to free space or get better speed without purchasing anything?

eg.
disk defragmnting
deleting prefetch folder
etc.

also right now there is 3 login files on my computer (like in windows xp when you start up for diff. family members etc.) if i narrowed that down to one would that give me a speed boost?

thanks in advance for any help

cheeseman222

 

[TRDCorolla1]

Get rid of some programs at startup will help boot time a bit. Do a Disk Cleanup, partitioning your large drive, managing virtual memory (read from PC World magazine that this helps, but I never messed with it before).

 

[~mr mixx~]

Yah, that and don't look at porn....And try not to get a virus on the comp..... j/k

yes, taking stuff out of the startup menu helps to load faster...

assuming you have XP....click start & un-pin anthing you don't use in there.

Or hardly use...

 

[cheeseman222]

thanks for all the help so far, i got read of a lot of stuff in the start menu and restarted and that helped more then i would of thought. I had my startup to just my printer and norton so i don't think i could get rid of any of those. my large drive is 18.8 gigs so is it really worth partitioning? Can someone tell me more about managing virtual memory? thanks again for all the help so far.

cheeseman222

 

[bengance]

Go to Cnet.com and read a few articles on boosting Windows XP performance. Run spyware detectors to get rid of malware that eats up resources (Run only Spybot Search & Destroy and Ad-Aware LE).

I saw an article today on cnet about using msconfig (start>run>msconfig). You should look at the startup tab and see what your computer is running. You'd be surprised how much junk there is. You could almost uncheck everything that doesn't look legitimate and be fine.

 

[Tommy Boy]

if you can, I would format the drive and reinstall windows, that works wonders, gets rid of all the crap that has accumulated over the years and the "bit rot" that occours. then go to this site http://www.blackviper.com and turn off all the unneeded services in windows xp, that guy has done a lot of research on those services and determined that a lot of them are not needed, have a look, that will certainly increase the performance of your system, at least a little

 

[cheeseman222]

thanks for the black viper website! It reall y helped a lot by i have a question...one of the tweaks made the bar where start menu and quick select icons grey and it looks really bad. do you know how i can fix that?

 

[cheeseman222]

Never mind...found out how by myself. I really appreciate the tips (especially tommy boy) any more would be great though.

 

[Tommy Boy]

no problem man, where the start bar went gray is just the windows default theme, just another thing to turn off to speed it up a little.

 

[Tommy Boy]

In maxumum pc magazine they built a dream system that cost over 12 grand

http://www.maximumpc.com/features/feature_2004-08-24.html

doesn't say anything about price on that website, but the 12 grand included an $800 paint job on the case and a $5000 Sharp 37in LCD display as well as 4 hard drives (2 WD 74gb raptors and 2 300gb Maxtor Diamondmax 10's), a Pentium 4 560 at 3.6ghz, an Asus P5AD2 Premium mobo, an ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition and lots of other cool stuff like a gig of ram, 2 dvd drives and an LCD touch screen in the front of the case.