Defragmenting

[stevem]

Another thing that I recommend people do, is to defragment their disks partitions. Depending on your disk activity, like how much you write and delete, then your partitions can become very defragmented quickly and this can slow your disk access.

When defragmenting, I always boot the PC into disganostic mode, so that there are a minimal set of drivers loaded and files opened. Open files cannot be moved and defragmented.

Click Start
Click run
Type msconfig
Click OK
Click Diagnostic Startup
Click OK
Click restart

Your system will then reboot, and there will be a window popup after booting, just click OK

Open windows explorer
Right click on the selected disk partition
Click Properties
Click Tools tab
Click Defragment Now

A window will open showing your disk partitions and some statistics. If a disk partition is less than about 20% free space, then the defragmentation process will not be too effective.

Make sure that the disk partition you want to defragment is selected, and then click on Defragment. In the lower window you want to see more blue than red. You can run as many defragmentation passes as you want.

After you are happy with the results, close the window.

Now you need to reboot back to normal mode

Click Start
Click Run
Enter msconfig
Click OK
Check Normal Startup
Click OK
Click Restart

You should see an improvement in performance.

[syeatman]

Bear in mind that the defragger that comes with Windows is not as fully featured and is slower than the 3rd party ones you can buy.

I use PerfectDisk from Rasco, and have used the common Diskeeper too in the past.

I do agree that this is a must do maintenance job for PC. You can get a decent performance gain. It is surprising how badly a drive gets so fragmented even with loads of free space. Saving large files will nearly always be saved into different fragments over the drive which slow down the read speed and also make the drive do more work.

That reminds me I've not done mine for a while...and I'm on a laptop where it makes even more sense with the generally slower hard disks!

[stevem]

Originally Posted by syeatman

Bear in mind that the defragger that comes with Windows is not as fully featured and is slower than the 3rd party ones you can buy.

Yes, but it is free. There are lots of other apps out there that mimic builtin windows tools, and most do a better job, but the windows tools are generally good enough for home use.

[Lord_Farquard]

Originally Posted by stevem

Yes, but it is free. There are lots of other apps out there that mimic builtin windows tools, and most do a better job, but the windows tools are generally good enough for home use.

Agreed, if you do thing on a regular basis (not yearly ) you should be fine with the windows tools. Power user need to go to aftermarket tool sets, but for the average user, don't get what you don't need.

[Coolhand]

An IT techie at work was sorting out a problem for me. While he was here, he showed me three neat things that I thought I'd pass along:
Defragment the boot sector of your hard drive to speed up the boot process. This isn't normally done when you run the Windows disk defragmenter.

Here's how: Execute the Run command (start button>run or Windows Key+R), then type cmd in the window that pops up; at the command prompt, type this: defrag c: -b (note the spaces, they have to be there). That's it. It only takes a few seconds. When you regain control of your command prompt, type exit and go back to your normal Windows session.

Clean out your prefetch file, for faster loads of Windows from boot-up. This is a file of all the executables you run within Windows, and it pre-loads them into RAM every time you load Windows. The trouble is, Windows never cleans out seldom used executables, so it loads a bunch of programs into RAM every time you start it, even if you never use them anymore. My machine had several executables of programs that I'd uninstalled, and they were hanging my boot-ups for up to five minutes lately. You'll notice quite a difference in Windows load time once you do this, plus you'll have some free RAM from all those programs that you weren't even running. I don't know why Micro$oft doesn't tell us about this. The only slight problem you'll notice is that when you launch a program for the first time after you do this, it'll be slightly slower starting up. After that, it'll be as fast as ever.

Here's how: Open Explorer and navigate to your prefetch directory. On mine, it's located at C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch. On a Windows 2000 or 2003 machine, it may be at C:\WINNT\Prefetch. Go into the right pane (files) and select all of them (Ctrl+A) then hit the delete key. That's it.

Repair minor registry errors with a free utility from Micro$oft, called regclean.exe. It's tiny, and pretty goof-proof. Just download it, unzip it, and run it. It has an undo feature if you need it. I didn't really notice any changes after I ran it, but it's always good to keep the registry clean.

That's all. Hope you find them useful.

[dogblower]

Coolhand - great post! MY PC is on its last legs so I need every bit of help I can get to keep it running while I save my pennies for the new one.

[syeatman]

Originally Posted by stevem

Yes, but it is free. There are lots of other apps out there that mimic builtin windows tools, and most do a better job, but the windows tools are generally good enough for home use.

The defragger in Windows is actually a slimmed down version of Diskeeper, MS did not ever think there would be a need for a defragger with NTFS (and stupidly said so!!) so did not develop one of their own.

There are loads of things to do to speed up your XP PC, and they are well documented on the net, but some of the best ways to speed up the PC is to uninstall any apps you do not use and to turn off services that are not necessary (Indexing Service for example)

[dizbuster]

Originally Posted by Coolhand

...Clean out your prefetch file, for faster loads of Windows from boot-up. This is a file of all the executables you run within Windows, and it pre-loads them into RAM every time you load Windows. The trouble is, Windows never cleans out seldom used executables, so it loads a bunch of programs into RAM every time you start it, even if you never use them anymore. My machine had several executables of programs that I'd uninstalled, and they were hanging my boot-ups for up to five minutes lately. You'll notice quite a difference in Windows load time once you do this, plus you'll have some free RAM from all those programs that you weren't even running. I don't know why Micro$oft doesn't tell us about this. The only slight problem you'll notice is that when you launch a program for the first time after you do this, it'll be slightly slower starting up. After that, it'll be as fast as ever.

Here's how: Open Explorer and navigate to your prefetch directory. On mine, it's located at C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch. On a Windows 2000 or 2003 machine, it may be at C:\WINNT\Prefetch. Go into the right pane (files) and select all of them (Ctrl+A) then hit the delete key. That's it...

I found this quite handy for my old slow machine thanks for the tip. However, I think I need to take this one stage further, or actually one step backwards, because I notice that there are about 7/8 items in my Prefetch folder which I don't want in there which are taking up memory. By that I mean I have programmes which have been plonked automatically in to the Start up processes and I want to take them out so that I use them only when I want to. For example Yahoo Messanger. I use this once in a while but it preloads during the startup process.

Does anyone know how to take this kind of thing out of the startup process ??

I seem to remember something about config.sys from the old days of MSDOS, but when I look at msconfig and view the config file in there, it's virtually empty. So where does Windows XP store this information ??

[stevem]

Originally Posted by dizbuster

I found this quite handy for my old slow machine thanks for the tip. However, I think I need to take this one stage further, or actually one step backwards, because I notice that there are about 7/8 items in my Prefetch folder which I don't want in there which are taking up memory. By that I mean I have programmes which have been plonked automatically in to the Start up processes and I want to take them out so that I use them only when I want to. For example Yahoo Messanger. I use this once in a while but it preloads during the startup process.

Does anyone know how to take this kind of thing out of the startup process ??

I seem to remember something about config.sys from the old days of MSDOS, but when I look at msconfig and view the config file in there, it's virtually empty. So where does Windows XP store this information ??

Have a look in msconfig

[dizbuster]

I did (last paragraph) but there wasn't anything in there which led me to believe that the info was stored somewhere else.

[syeatman]

There's actually a few places that XP uses to fire up apps when you login. By far the most common are...

1. The startup folders (C:\Documents and Settings\"username"\Start Menu\Programs\Startup and C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup)

2. The registry. The two most common places in the registry are the run keys.

It's probably easiest if you use the System Config Utility. Go to Start, Run and type in msconfig. Go to the startup tab (last one) and in the list you should see the apps you are looking for, they will probably not be in plain english such as "Yahoo Messenger" but you should be able to tell from the name, if not look in the "command" column and it should be more obvious. Deselect the apps you don't want to start and hit OK. Choose whether to reboot or not.

When you do reboot, you will be prompted with a dialog box informing you that you are running in Diagnostic or selective startup mode. Just tick the box to not show the dialog box when Windows starts and that should be it, now check that the apps have not launched to be sure.

Hope this helps, let us know if you have any grief or further problems