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Geek Culture / Speeding up my PC

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Bozzy
18
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Joined: 10th Sep 2006
Location: Birmingham, UK
Posted: 11th Jan 2008 16:39
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Hi,

My PC is a year old and has got painfully slow, especially at startup.

What are the ways to get it back to (or close to) its former glory?

Cheers,
Bozzy

"I'm a firm believer that if a team scores one goal, then the other has to score two to win."
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bitJericho
22
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Posted: 11th Jan 2008 16:41
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Do a clean fresh install.

This time, don't let it get full of spyware.


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andrey d
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Posted: 12th Jan 2008 00:53
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Yep, clean install will be the primary way of saving your PC.

Then:
1. Don't install a bunch of crap.
2. Don't have 40 programs starting, for example, msn, printer crap, sound crap, Adobe crap, ect.
3. Don't have active virus or spyware scanners, scan manually only
4. Don't let your computer get infected. I recommend Adaware for removing spyware and viruses, and get AVG Free in case Adaware can't handle some virus. Both are freeware and PWN craptastic Norton and anything else those idiots create.
5. Defragment every month.

That's a pretty good way of keeping a clean computer.
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bitJericho
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Posted: 12th Jan 2008 00:55
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Quote: "Don't have active virus or spyware scanners, scan manually only"


You'd be a fool. Instead. Drop norton or semantic and get a good antivirus. I'd use Nod32, it doesn't slow the computer, and it offers better protection.

AVG blows about as much as norton, try and stay away from it if you can.


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Benjamin
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Location: France
Posted: 12th Jan 2008 00:57 Edited at: 12th Jan 2008 00:57
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Quote: "AVG blows about as much as norton, try and stay away from it if you can."

I switched from Nod32 to AVG when it failed to find a virus that the latter did. What's so bad about AVG?

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NeX the Fairly Fast Ferret
19
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Posted: 12th Jan 2008 00:58
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I have no anti-virus, and if I have a virus, it's not done enough in the past four years for me to care.


Since the other one was scaring you guys so much...
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Phaelax
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Posted: 12th Jan 2008 00:59
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AVG has very poor polymorphic virus detection.


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bitJericho
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Posted: 12th Jan 2008 01:00
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It's also painfully slow. On an older laptop that runs great with xp and nod 32, that same computer can't handle avg installed (freezes up for periods of time).


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bitJericho
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Posted: 12th Jan 2008 01:03
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Quote: "I switched from Nod32 to AVG when it failed to find a virus that the latter did"


All av's miss viruses at one time or another. When you compare avg to nod32 on virus tests, nod32 comes way ahead.


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andrey d
17
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Posted: 12th Jan 2008 01:10
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Quote: "Quote: "Don't have active virus or spyware scanners, scan manually only"

You'd be a fool. Instead. Drop norton or semantic and get a good antivirus. I'd use Nod32, it doesn't slow the computer, and it offers better protection.

AVG blows about as much as norton, try and stay away from it if you can."

How so? Surfing software crack sites and porn all day would be about the only thing to make me flinch about viruses.

Quote: "AVG has very poor polymorphic virus detection."

AVG worked fine for me, the combo of Adaware and AVG are all I need, if you hate it, well, I'm not exactly sure where you get such high level viruses anyway.
Quote: "
It's also painfully slow. On an older laptop that runs great with xp and nod 32, that same computer can't handle avg installed (freezes up for periods of time)."

I just let it run when I'm away from computer, but speed wouldn't be an issue to me anyway.
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bitJericho
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Posted: 12th Jan 2008 01:16
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Well, you don't run the active checking on avg, so you wouldn't have any issues.

I too run without an AV, as I run linux for most things, and vista just for games.

But if having an active scanner is important to you, I'd use nod32. If not, quite frankly, I still wouldn't us avg, I'd use clamAV


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GatorHex
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Posted: 14th Jan 2008 19:49 Edited at: 14th Jan 2008 19:56
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Delete all the crud in your startup folder and in the taskbar on the right hand side.

All this crud has to load a boot up and if you got loads it will slow bootup down.

Clean out your temp directories especialy the Internet Explorer cache and make sure your hard drive space isn't running low. Running a defrag might help to reorder your files to make them load faster.

DinoHunter (still no nVidia compo voucher!), CPU/GPU Benchmark, DarkFish Encryption DLL, War MMOG (WIP), 3D Model Viewer
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jasonhtml
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Location: OC, California, USA
Posted: 15th Jan 2008 01:46
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1. use firefox or something other than internet explorer
2. for anti-virus: Avast anyone? i use it and i seems to work a lot better than nortan, which i used to have and was painfully slowing down my pc...
3. instant messengers and stuff that opens at bootup, stop it. sure, it might be nice if it logs in for you, but you will be so much happier when you don't have to wait for it to boot up and you can just login whenever...

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Jeku
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Posted: 15th Jan 2008 04:02
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Quote: "Delete all the crud in your startup folder and in the taskbar on the right hand side."


The Startup folder only has a fraction of the things that run on boot.

Run MSConfig and click the Startup tab. Go through all of these items and uncheck the ones you don't need on startup. I always find useless things in here that I didn't permit in the first place, and can usually speed up my startups by removing them.

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tha_rami
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Posted: 15th Jan 2008 04:10
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I install AVG on all PC's I repair, Nod32 just didn't do it for me nor my clients. Never had problems with it, not even on a four year old laptop.


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Osiris
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Posted: 15th Jan 2008 04:16
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Get that thing on a treadmill!

Seriously though, run an antivirus scan, spyware scan, defragment, run a chkdsk /f, goto msconfig and remove everything that you can start up if you need it (like printers, adobe, ect...) however dont remove stuff that you would need like a wireless mouse thing, you know, so your mouse works.

RIP Max-Tuesday, November 2 2007
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Keo C
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Posted: 15th Jan 2008 05:15
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Quote: "I install AVG on all PC's I repair"

Never repair my PC. I used to manually kill AVG's real-time protection to run anything. Probably rare I guess. I use ClamAV now.


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Phaelax
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Posted: 15th Jan 2008 05:48
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Quote: "use firefox or something other than internet explorer"

He wants to speed it up, not slow it down.


Just stay away from Nod32, its file scan is painfully slow. I like Symantec AV(different than Norton)

For anyone else laying the smack on Norton, you all may want to read a few "professional" reviews of the software and see how all those beloved alternatives fair against it.


1. Defrag
2. If you can, clean unwanted registry keys of unused programs
3. Scans (spyware/virus/etc..)


Or if you're one of my customers calling:
1. Clear cache and cookies
2. Reboot.
3. Doesn't work? Let me put in a ticket for ya


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Osiris
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Posted: 15th Jan 2008 05:55
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Quote: "He wants to speed it up, not slow it down."

??

on my PC Firefox beats IE hands down in speed.

RIP Max-Tuesday, November 2 2007
You will be dearly missed.
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Phaelax
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Posted: 15th Jan 2008 06:13
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I've never seen FF run faster than IE on anything. And didn't a study show FF had more security holes than IE? I'm no MS fanboy, and I will admit FF is a lot more stable, but it's still slower to load and uses more memory.


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Agent Dink
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Posted: 15th Jan 2008 06:22
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Quote: "but it's still slower to load and uses more memory.
"


In my experiences it does use more memory, but it loads faster on decent machines.

And the memory thing isn't an issue for me as I have 4gigs

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Phaelax
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Posted: 15th Jan 2008 06:31
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Speed-wise has been the same on a P4 and a C2D. And I also have 4gb. No, it's not an issue, but thats not the point. Just because you can overcome its inefficiencies doesn't make it any better of a program. It's like saying Vista is awesome....... with 16GB of ram.


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tha_rami
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Posted: 15th Jan 2008 06:46
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Firefox runs stable, avoids many of the crap things written specifically for IE and actually keeps to HTML coding conventions. IE just sh!ts all over them. We actually have to work around stuff to get things \'IE-compliant\' nowadays in CSS. Screw IE. Everyone to Firefox.

AVG works perfectly, like said, even on a four year old PC. For kicks, I´ve just installed it on an 8 year old computer running ´98 )´cause that was the best it can run back then\', and AVG runs smoothly. Its scans take a lot longer though, and that 98 GUI is horrible compared to Vista.

Amazing how quickly we get spoiled by new things... I remember thinking 98 was top of the bill. But then again, I thought that of EGA graphics too (the first PC revolution that I can remember was our old CGA beind dumped for an EGA).


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Jeku
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Posted: 15th Jan 2008 07:42
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I too think Firefox is awful at memory management. There is a crazy memory leak in there--- at work just a few hours of listening to podcasts will cause Firefox to eat close to 300MB of RAM Even if I browse to plain old Google or some other simple site, it never goes down unless I restart it.

Apparently FF 3 is faster and uses less memory. My new computer has 4GB of RAM but it still irritates me when I go to the task manager and see hundreds of MB taken up.

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Benjamin
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Posted: 15th Jan 2008 08:03 Edited at: 15th Jan 2008 08:04
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I agree, the memory management in Firefox is a bit stupid. Just searching through MSDN with a few tabs open can some how increase memory usage to 80MB. The annoying thing is that it doesn't free this memory when you close the tabs.

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andrey d
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Posted: 15th Jan 2008 08:22
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Quote: "I've never seen FF run faster than IE on anything. And didn't a study show FF had more security holes than IE?"

Runs the same unless your computer is craptastic. If you're worried about several milliseconds of difference, then there's something wrong.

FF less secure? That'd be a no.
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