M wrote:
>My PC is about 5 yrs old Win XP Home is about all I know at this point.
>
>I bought it just to work the internet. It has slowed down as of late
>and would like an easily understanable way to get things moving along
>again. >>


There are many possibilities, it's impossible to say without knowing a lot 
more about your computer and how you use it.

1. The commonest reason is having too many programs running in the 
background. Go to Start button/Run and type msconfig. Then click on the 
"startup" tab and there you will see most of the things running every time 
you reboot your computer. Ideally, disable all of them, reboot, and see if 
that makes any difference. Msconfig won't allow you to disable anything 
vital to the system, so you are quite safe. And you can retick the boxes 
later if you want to put anything back into startup. Keep your startups to 
the bare essentials such as antivirus if you can. If you don't recognise 
it, you can probably do without it!

2. Certain Services in XP are notorious resource hogs and should be 
disabled. Run msconfig again, this time click the Services tab. It will 
show you all running services. Untick each service you want to disable.

Services which are well-known to slow the system are any Indexing services 
(eg Fast Indexing), and Fast User Switching.  Untick these. There are many 
other services which are unnecessary, but usually they do not cause 
problems. There are many tutorials available on the internet if you want to 
investigate that further. Just Google for "disable services xp". Don't turn 
off services that you aren't sure about--many of these are essential.

3. Any programs which are set to auto-update can screw performance up if 
they are unable for any reason to connect home. While they are trying to 
"phone out" (like spyware), valuable resources are being used at the cost 
of performance.

4. If performance was once OK but has gradually slowed down, adding extra 
memory will NOT help unless you have installed a lot of additional 
software. It is often cited as a "cure-all" fix for performance, but unless 
your computer is otherwise clean, it will only help if RAM is critically 
low. You don't state how much RAM you have, but for XP, 512Mb is minimum 
and generally quite adequate for your needs. Performance will likely fall 
off easily with anything less than this.

5. In a few cases, firewalls or internet security suites can cause horrible 
slowdowns (Nortons used to be notorious for this, though the 2007 version 
appears much improved). Try disconnecting your phone line if you're on 
broadband, then disable any security software. Reboot and see if that makes 
any difference.

6. If your emailer is Outlook Express, don't forget to empty its deleted 
mail folder regularly. That can cause problems if allowed to get overfull.

7. After 5 years without a reformat or registry restore, I'm not at all 
surprised that your computer is slowing. Over time, a lot of junk 
accumulates in the registry and system files. If these aren't cleaned out 
every year or two (depending on your use) the system will become clogged 
and slow down.

You may well find that, in the end, rather than spending endless hours 
looking for causes and possibly getting nowhere, it's much quicker and 
easier to bite the bullet, save all your data and settings, and reformat 
the hard drive. Reinstall XP, and your computer will be like brand new again.

You will, of course, have to reinstall all your programs, but that really 
shouldn't take too long.  It's without doubt the best way, and often the 
only way, to really bring back original performance.

And, no, you can't just "Clean out RAM".  The nearest you can do to that is 
to restore the registry---and that pre-supposes that you have made regular 
registry backups. For that, you need a freeware called ERUNT which will 
keep any registry backups you make. It's a quick and easy task which should 
be done regularly. Sadly, many people don't do it.

Relying on XP's System Restore is of very limited use, and can be very 
unreliable.

Yes, the hard drive CAN be used to increase virtual memory, but it's much 
much slower than RAM, so is unlikely to help you. If incorrectly set, it 
will slow things even more. Over the years, I've fiddled around with 
various recommended settings for Virtual Memory, but any theoretical gains 
have been more in my imagination than real, I think. It's not a fix for 
other things that are wrong in the system.

Don Penlington


 From the Beach at Surfers Paradise in sunny Queensland.
Computer tutorials, local scenery,  and other things at my website:
http://users.tpg.com.au/deepend/index1.html

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