Turning a PC setting off to make computer much faster..???

[Cadillac-89]

I remember on the laptop I used to have (XP Pro.), it had 512 RAM and was very slow. Then I had this DVD that I wanted to rip to post excerpts of it on YouTube. Anyway, I had downloaded a program to rip the DVD and after setting it up and launching it for the first time, the program told me that something was set a certain way and because of its being on (as opposed to off I guess, not sure how to phrase this), it was making my computer perform worse than it should and asked me if I wanted to turn this setting off. I did turn it off and it was like night and day - The PC was actually quite fast after that! Anyways, I have no idea what that DVD Rip program was called and also no idea what settings I changed and no longer have that PC. Does someone know how I can chance the setting on my current computer, because it is quite slow for the amount of RAM it has (which is at the PC's maximum amount by the way) and I'd like it to be faster! Thanks.

 

[Prodigy146]

Right away Defragment your drive.

whats your computer specs? dvd ripping is extremely cpu intensive

 

[Cadillac-89]

Right away Defragment your drive.

whats your computer specs? dvd ripping is extremely cpu intensive

I just want to know what the program changed in the PC's settings. The laptop at the time was OK for ripping the excerpt (especially after changing that setting), but exact specs are not known. I still have it but the hard drive was giving me a boot error for a couple months and then finally crashed about a month ago so now it's just sitting there. The computer I'm temporarily using as a replacement (now) is so old there's not point in even going into specs. Let's just say I upgraded its 128 MB of RAM to 768 MB right away.

Actually thanks for the defrag tip too. "You last defragmented this drive 676 day(s) ago."

 

[KCallahan]

Lol, I used to have a problem with forgetting to defrag my machine too! Now I use DiskKeeper, which has the option to 'set it & forget it', so it'll do it on it's own.