Discussion on:

Five tips for speeding up a slow PC

I would just add two more steps, to a great list so far.

6? Check whats running at start-up. You can use the built in Microsoft configuration utility (Start->Run-> msconfig), or a third party tool, like ccleaner already mentioned. Get rid of those things that run automatically that you don't need, such as quicktime, adobe acrobat, instant messengers. They don't have to run at startup, since you only need them running when you are actually using them.

7? Restart the computer. So often, when I get these calls for a slow machine, the user hasn't restarted in 3-4 weeks. Not restarting regularly can leave old processes hanging in memory, using up resources, thereby slowing your system. A restart will clear all of that out.

Just my 2 cents.

Jason

While specific to the browsing experience of old computers, this does wonders. Run something like noscript that lets you selectively white list what domains can execute scripts in your browser. You'll find an incredible speed bump, it's amazing how much flash advertisements and poorly written js slow down and older computer.

How do you do this?

At our agency, we turn the PC's off at night. There's no sense in letting it run for 15 or so hours when there's no one in the building. I know about the old concept that that it's easier on the drive to let it run than to turn it off often, but today's drive are a lot hardier, and turning it on one a dy is not unreasonable.

If you turn your computer off every night, when does it do maintenance? Oh yeah... "Hey user... this computer is going to run slow for you most of the time because it is doing all of our domain administration tasks during the day while you are trying to work. Sorry about that, but you just keep shutting it down at night because it is not saving you any electricity but it's just better".

There's no real need to post like this. For a far less antagonistic way of making your point, try this, instead:

"I like the idea of running maintenance scripts overnight, which lessens the impact on users during their workday. Turning off computers every night can impede that."

However, I have a rebuttal: it's possible to use a Wake on LAN trigger, so the maintenance scripts will still be completed overnight. (My own company uses this, waking computers at 4 am to run maintenance scripts, so that they're ready to go by the time users start arriving at 6, and minimizing the time computers idly chew through the electric bill.)

Granted, for various reasons, not all computers respond correctly to that trigger, but still, for many companies, the electricity savings found by turning off several hundred (or even tens of) computers every night can be a big boost to their bottom line. Especially for large companies, the extra cost of making an occasional deskside visit to manually maintain those few computers that don't awaken is cheaper than leaving all of them on every night and weekend.

We do the same thing here at the office.

I've got a few scripts automating system, disks and registry cleanup. Usually last 1 hour so I wake all the PCs at 04:30 and every one of them are ready at 06:00 when the staff starts.

Makes my life a lot easier...

How much daily maintenance do you do? Run slowly "most of the time?"

Every night. Usually takes about 30 minutes to an hour for the virus scan to complete on the average machine here.

Bill

instead of letting them run all night

With today power compilant computers you can setup your power settings to leave your computers always ON at small power consumption. You can setup power settings in control pannel to turn off monitor at 10 minutes of no use, hard disk at one hour and suspend the pc after two hours of no use. A suspended pc have very very slow power consumption. You can buy a KillaWATT in amazon.com and check this by yourself.

We leave ours on. However, each computer goes into standby (ie min amount of power) about 2 hours after last mouse/kbd click and REBOOTS at 2am. This clears cache etc and loads certain updates. We don't defrag local disks as our users folders are on the servers. But all the above tips are good - I do them on my home PC's. And you know how bad techies are at looking after their own computers!

I've found that a fairly high number (well above 10%) of computers don't come out of Standby correctly. We advise our users to avoid using it, especially when they call to complain that their computer won't wake from it.

(Edited for clarity.)

Personally I have had better luck with newer operating systems, but I still tend to avoid standby where possible.

Bill

I have 100 pcs in the office, most of them have standby settings without issues. All are Dell computers.

I had standby issues with my Home dell computer with windows 7 but the problem was related with the upgraded HD Video card from ATI. Windows 7 do not have all the required drivers for this card (capture / export / hdmi).

Our office used to have a policy to leave machines on over the weekends, but too many would be dead come Monday morning.
Even in standby/hibernate modes, the failure rates were too large to be acceptable (power supplies mostly) - tech staff would have to do a mad rush to get people back to work.
Counter-intuitive I know, but technology can't always be predicted.

That sounds like bad power coming out of the wall plugs. Did you have UPS on the machines to smooth out the highs/lows and cover over the outages?

I have flaky power at home and have found a night and day difference since finally putting a UPS on the machine.

oh, five steps which I forgot... good to remmember actually.
I always was thinking about msconfig/update OS/check with antivirus, update it...

1-5 is a great start, but sometimes the problem is hardware related.
6. Check connectors, Yes you need to open the case for this. Sometimes, although this is rare any more, connector get corroded and loose contact. Pull cable out and reinsert them 2-3 times to clean them off. Use contact cleaner spray(not WD-40)

7. Reseat any cards in slots. The same principle applies with card as does cables. Memory modules may not give errors, but just function very slowly.

8. Clean or replace the fan. An overheating system may not crash just go slow. This is true especially in laptops.

My PC is slow to power up when on the network at work (I power up and shutdown daily). I'll confess up front that I don't defrag, etc. as often as I should.

However, I've noticed after using the notebook at home, that when I return back to work, the first power up back on the network is always significantly quicker than the subsequent one(s). Any explanations?

Thanks,
Anthony

Maybe your administrator put a login script , so during startup on your office network, your PC runs this script. It add few second to 30 second , depending the PC speed and script length. I use it to map network drives automatically in user's PC/laptop.

Another thing that may cause slow start up is automatic update of (corporate) anti virus that scheduled on start up.

Due to boot-up and shut-down scripts, our laptops bot up more slowly at home when the office.
We've put this down to the presence of a network, but no servers. The scripts time-out, then the logon carries on.
In these cases, we suggest to leave the broadband line out until you're rady to connect, abd unplug it before shutting down. This is for home-use only.

In your case, I assume your scripts are not run from th PC's side, but called from the servers. No servers = no scripts, so a faster boot up.

Do you have any work network drives mapped on the laptop? You may not be connecting at first boot but may access the drive there after and subsequent reboots might try and re-connect during boot = slower boot up.

If I put my laptop in standby before I leave work and then boot it up at home, as soon as I flip the wireless switch Windows Explorer (aka Taskbar) locks up for maybe 10 minutes. I fired up wireshark once before turning on the radio and witnessed Windows trying to contact every DFS mount point in the list - which in my case is around 100. I have to believe there is some configuration option that would prevent this behavior, but I have not dug into it and even if I did find the answer it would be ignored by our client configuration team. So what I do is wait for it to lock up, then switch off the radio. This seems to abort the process and frees everything back up. When I again turn on the radio it doesn't seem to start back up.

Note that this only occurs if I were first connected to DFS shares, put it in standby, and then bring it out of standby while not connected to the Windows domain. Also note that it doesn't seem to help if I undock at work (disconnect from network) before I put it in standby.

Oh by the way... this lockup sometimes occurs randomly - it just happened as I was typing this. Same solution: shut off the radio and within 10 seconds it starts responding again.