Sunray
Its sunny somewhere.
Off sick, so I thought I write this.
You get people assume that this is standard behaviour. I keep reading about people reformatting their machines to make it faster. Crazy. The number of applications installed on Windows in no way slows the PC down.
My PC has never slowed down over time. I have configured it in a way that prevents this happening. Unfortunately manufacturers of Laptops and PC's seem oblivious to these techniques so dont configure it in this way. I noted PC Pro have these in there top 10 windows tips, though I've been doing this for a decade.
Step 1
You can do two things, either partition the disk to have a large and a small partition, say 5Gb or install a second hard disk. In my PC I currently have two high performance disks, one for my system disk and the other for volatile data. On my laptop I've just partitioned the disk up.
Step 2
Into this partition or second hard disk move the swap file. Most swap files are set for windows to manage and it will make it larger and smaller. You can prevent this by fixing the size to 1 1/2 times the available memory, in my case 3Gb. Thats MS's recommendation.
Step 3a
Move the internet history into the new partition or onto the second hard disk. In FireFox you need to create a new profile with the Profile manager. You can move where the profile is stored. In IE you use the Internet Options in the control panel to move the internet history. Not looked at Chrome, Opera and Safari. I would hope they can do the same.
Step 3b [optional]
Move your profile off the system disk.
This is an optional step because it generally requires a second hard disk to make any real sense. You don't want to be sticking all your documents and downloads and stuff into a tiny partition on the main disk. If you have a big disk, you could partition it 3 ways (big,big,small) and move the profile to the second . I'm not sure such a move will hugely beneficial on a single disk and might cause you more issues than it solves.
Moving the users profile to a second disk is done very easily in Vista. Read this
http://www.edbott.com/weblog/?p=1371
For XP this requires editing the registry, so be careful.
http://www.jiffle.net/node/95
Take notice of note #1 and #2 at the bottom.
Step 5
Schedule up a defragment to run at least once a day. Since the advent of XP the defragment has been a command line tool and can be scheduled up with the Task Scheduler. This is found in the Administrative Tools in control panel. With Vista, there is one created for you at midnight.
Perhaps better to set it to run when your machine isn't being used yet still switched on.
Step 6
I call this a step, but its more a routine maintenance check I do from time to time. Unfortunately this isn't really for the non-technical. This is because the descriptions of what is run at start up is pretty limited. Also requires a lot of experience to what should be running and what shouldn't.
Click Start->Run... and enter Msconfig. This tool allows you to see what is being run up at start up. Click the start up tab.
This can seriously effect start up performance and perhaps general performance. I tend to think that only the AV and the graphics driver helpers are really necessary but its never that simple. I tend to remove all but the items I think are essential. I just ran it and I see that quick time has something running at start up. Why? I don't see why quicktime needs to have something constantly running so I've disabled it.
Background
People machines slow down due to disk fragmentation of the swap file and general fragmentation of the disk. With the advent of heavy browser use, IE will download all those tiny gif's (a few kb each) and over time delete them, its set to 20 days by default. A good description here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defragmentation
High volume of small files being deleted will cause any disk to get badly fragmented. With windows managing the swap file, it becomes spread all across the disk leading to hideous performance. What the above techniques do is to move all the volatile data away from the system disk. Massively preventing fragmentation.
The end result is a nippy machine at all times.
You get people assume that this is standard behaviour. I keep reading about people reformatting their machines to make it faster. Crazy. The number of applications installed on Windows in no way slows the PC down.
My PC has never slowed down over time. I have configured it in a way that prevents this happening. Unfortunately manufacturers of Laptops and PC's seem oblivious to these techniques so dont configure it in this way. I noted PC Pro have these in there top 10 windows tips, though I've been doing this for a decade.
Step 1
You can do two things, either partition the disk to have a large and a small partition, say 5Gb or install a second hard disk. In my PC I currently have two high performance disks, one for my system disk and the other for volatile data. On my laptop I've just partitioned the disk up.
Step 2
Into this partition or second hard disk move the swap file. Most swap files are set for windows to manage and it will make it larger and smaller. You can prevent this by fixing the size to 1 1/2 times the available memory, in my case 3Gb. Thats MS's recommendation.
Step 3a
Move the internet history into the new partition or onto the second hard disk. In FireFox you need to create a new profile with the Profile manager. You can move where the profile is stored. In IE you use the Internet Options in the control panel to move the internet history. Not looked at Chrome, Opera and Safari. I would hope they can do the same.
Step 3b [optional]
Move your profile off the system disk.
This is an optional step because it generally requires a second hard disk to make any real sense. You don't want to be sticking all your documents and downloads and stuff into a tiny partition on the main disk. If you have a big disk, you could partition it 3 ways (big,big,small) and move the profile to the second . I'm not sure such a move will hugely beneficial on a single disk and might cause you more issues than it solves.
Moving the users profile to a second disk is done very easily in Vista. Read this
http://www.edbott.com/weblog/?p=1371
For XP this requires editing the registry, so be careful.
http://www.jiffle.net/node/95
Take notice of note #1 and #2 at the bottom.
Step 5
Schedule up a defragment to run at least once a day. Since the advent of XP the defragment has been a command line tool and can be scheduled up with the Task Scheduler. This is found in the Administrative Tools in control panel. With Vista, there is one created for you at midnight.
Perhaps better to set it to run when your machine isn't being used yet still switched on.
Step 6
I call this a step, but its more a routine maintenance check I do from time to time. Unfortunately this isn't really for the non-technical. This is because the descriptions of what is run at start up is pretty limited. Also requires a lot of experience to what should be running and what shouldn't.
Click Start->Run... and enter Msconfig. This tool allows you to see what is being run up at start up. Click the start up tab.
This can seriously effect start up performance and perhaps general performance. I tend to think that only the AV and the graphics driver helpers are really necessary but its never that simple. I tend to remove all but the items I think are essential. I just ran it and I see that quick time has something running at start up. Why? I don't see why quicktime needs to have something constantly running so I've disabled it.
Background
People machines slow down due to disk fragmentation of the swap file and general fragmentation of the disk. With the advent of heavy browser use, IE will download all those tiny gif's (a few kb each) and over time delete them, its set to 20 days by default. A good description here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defragmentation
High volume of small files being deleted will cause any disk to get badly fragmented. With windows managing the swap file, it becomes spread all across the disk leading to hideous performance. What the above techniques do is to move all the volatile data away from the system disk. Massively preventing fragmentation.
The end result is a nippy machine at all times.
