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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.

If you are running Windows sometimes it is necessary to restart the computer twice a day! Don't forget to reinstall Windows once or twice a year too......

I believe that your are acting under the mistaken notion that stems from the tech support folks at many of the big equipment manufacturers whose solution to a problem that they can?t quickly diagnose is to ?reformat and reinstall.? Reformat and reinstall accomplishes three things:
1) It gets you off the phone,
2) It always works,
3) It doesn?t create a need for them to perform any real troubleshooting.

A major bone of contention between a former supervisor and myself was that he thought defragging a computer was a waste of time.

In fact, he went so far as to say it was a useless program. Luckily, I no longer work there, although I do feel sorry for the users he no doubt is still abusing with his ignorance.

The same thing applies to some so called repairs services, most notably in my experience, the Geek Squad, who have told several people that in order to fix their machine they need to use a recovery disk. Since these users hadn't made one they were basically screwed. I fixed their machines in less than an hour and made them a recovery disk for less than GS was going to charge them for using a pre-made disk.

they got that name right, but instead of geek it should be rip off!
No seriously I figure there are some good techs that work for them and hopefully skirt thier rules now and then.

As an independent repairman for the last 10 years, reinstalling the OS is generally the last thing I want to do if possible.

It dosen't take to long to figure out if that's going to be needed or not.

But what I really wanted to say is as an independent, competeing with the likes of the geeksqaud, make it work, etc. that my clients truly appreciate that if I say were gonna reload, that all your data will be preserved.
I don't make nearly as much as I could in this biz becuase of that, but my clients love me and would call no one else.
I've been scratching my head a lot lately watching ad's on TV for PC fix it systems ect. I know there raking in the dollars, but I just don;t have the fortitude to be a bad guy, not to mention I do not want to hear the complaints when this crap dosen't work.

I would agree and reiterate:
see this youtube link, one of many like it... LOL. Nutin' like good old fashioned hard work to do it right the first time, making the next time that much easier.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIJfuetJWSE

I had the misfortune of working for customer support for Stream who was acting as telephone support for a big PC manufacturer.

That was their solution to any problems that would take more than a few minutes to resolve. FDisk, Format, Re-Install the Operating System (or FFR as it was fondly referred to) using the System Restore Disks. "There! Just like new!"

I left after a month. When the number of phone calls is more important than actually helping the customer, it's not customer service, it's a scam.

Try a previous restore point if not try a repair before thinking of reinstalling backing up and reinstalling apps and data in stand alone systems. Remeber the backup can also have the problem.

Restoring from a "previous restore point" has never been successful for me (in Windows XP) not at least in my experience. But I've not done too many of these ...

or at least, my friends' collective bacon when I'm working on their machines, a number of times. I always set them after a good fix, you never know when they will come in handy.

maybe one out of 2 restores work. Viruses use system restore to come back & haunt you!

You're right, I have to routinely delete the restores as a part of virus cleanup. But on the problems where something has gone corrupt or a bad driver install, the restores work great.

And even after I've fixed a virus issue, I create a restore, because so many things can go wrong that may potentially be helped by it. Always a good option to have, just in case.

I never had good restore from system restore. The problem is always still there. I restore from Image backup instead

I have never been able to find any value in the restore points either. Never worked for me. But then I must admit that I never really took the time to understand what exactly was being restored using this utility. I guess since I don't understand it I don't use it much.

On one occasion I uninstalled an essential program by mistake. My client didn't have access to a replacement, and couldn't operate without it. Restore fixed the problem like magic and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. And yes, it was a well maintained system, if I do say so myself.

System restore can be a great time saver when it works. I've found that it seems to work better on systems that were well maintained to begin with. On systems that have tons of junk running on start-up it's not very reliable. And for any type of malware damage no matter how minor forget it.

I think restore has worked once in 4 years on 25 machines

On PC's that are running slowly I have been having good luck running chkdsk /R on PC's running Windows XP.

You need to be more proactive when looking for early hard drive failure, if you want to avoid data loss.

If you have episodic slowdowns where keystrokes are delayed and the mouse pointer stops moving, you should suspect hard drive retries on failing sectors. Generally, this pattern of slowdown results when code is delayed within a section where interrupts are disabled, which is usually only within tight and critical bits of driver code.

When the hard drive gets a checksum mis-match, it will retry the operation until it works, or fail after X retries. If "too many" failures, it will mark that sector as bad, and map its address to a spare one; if this is during a read operation, it should try to relocate the contents from the bad sector, but this may fail. All of this happens within the drive itself, and is invisible to the rest of the PC.

If the OS detects a read failure, it will only be if the above mechanisms have failed. If the file system is NTFS, it will retry the operation in much the same way the drive's firmware did, though this time the results may be visible in the depths of the file system. Each retry attempt will likely spawn X retry attempts within the firmware, and could beat a sick drive to death; this is how those seconds-long stuck-mouse pauses arise.

When you format a volume, the same process occurs except presumably without attempts to preserve the disk contents. At least the number of OS-visible bad clusters are reported.

When you do a ChkDsk /R, it's the same sort of thing; nested retries, defects hidden if the drive's firmware "fixes" the problem, etc.

You can see into the firmware's activities via a SMART reporting tool. If enabled in BIOS, POST can tell you if SMART is "bad"; the OS seems to have no awareness of SMAT at all.

SMART tolerates a LOT of defects before it flags a value as "bad", so don't wait for a "bad" SMART status! The critical SMART attributes to watch are Reallocated Sectors, Reallocation Events, Pending Sectors and Offline Uncorrectable. Look at the raw data counters for these, which should all be zero, not just the Value or Worst columns, and least of all the Status column.

Here's how each SMART attribute is reported and logged. Raw events are counted up from zero in the raw Data column, and if these reach a certain number, the Value is reduced by one. Periodically, both raw Data and Value counters are reset, but the lowest-ever Value is retained in Worst. If Value or Worst every reach Threshold, the Status then changes from "OK" to "Bad".

But if the counters are reset before Data ever causes Value to be reduced, everything stays "OK" forever. As it is, several loops of raw Data and steps downwards of Value mean thousands of flaws are considered "OK", as far as Status is concerned.

So... don't wait for bad drives to find you, and don't use ChkDsk /R to paper over the cracks. Use a SMAT reporting tool to look into the raw data details, and act on what you see - first, file-copy the crucials, then file-copy all files, then image the C: partition, then run surface scan diagnostics.

A failing drive may die within an hour, and you don't want to be left only with diagnostic reports, or an unusable part of a failed partition image - that is why I'd do those steps in that particular order.

Oh, there is nothing that ticks me off more than someone suggesting I reinstall (or at work, "restage"). When I tell them just what I think of their "solution" they act surprised. That is what they do to everyone. Why do I have a problem with it?

I have a problem with it because I have several non-standard programs that I use to perform my job. It sometimes takes quite a bit of configuration of these programs and systems configured correctly. I tweak the um... "whizzed" up settings that come with the standard install to get the thing performing correctly. When I move into a new laptop I insist that I keep both the old and the new for at least 2 weeks until I get the new one where I want and need it to be.

I once had a sound card go out in a home PC that I bought from a major manufacturer (won't say the name but it has 3 letters in it). The PC came with a standalone diagnostic CD that also told me the sound card had failed. When I called to get it replaced the tech told me he couldn't send one out without my reinstalling windows first. When I pointed out that when I booted from the standalone diagnostic CD it also reported a failed sound card his reasoning was, well, maybe it is a bad diagnostic CD. You need to reinstall Windows. I immediately asked to speak to a supervisor who promptly sent me the new card.

So don't tell me to reinstall because you don't have a clue what you are doing!!! I don't let them get anywhere near my PC anymore.

On another note, I have noticed that people who have only ever known Windows tend to think the same "solutions" apply to all systems. I once had a site admin go around and reboot all the ethernet switches at the site because he couldn't connect to some service somewhere. This was probably a couple of dozen switches and a router! Hey - control-alt-delete always works (if not, reinstall!). Those of you who have been around long enough to remember mainframes - can you imagine rebooting the system to fix a problem?!?!? And if that doesn't work, reinstall MVS? You betcha.

==flame off==... whew. sorry.

In my experience, it seems that a lot of techs like to do the really hard stuff first and ignore or are ignorant of the simple fixes. I've had a number of issues fixed very easily by dropping in a good copy of a .dll or some other easy fix instead of overhauling the entire system. I am sometimes ridiculed until I fix the system with an easy method, and then they shut up...

If you have access to run non-standard programs then you can probably get permission to take or have IT take a fresh system image after a clean install plus your additional programs. Reinstall would then just be a drive image restore including your addons.

I'm spoiled in the *nix world, I can rebuild an install in about the same time it takes a drive image restore to run. Long as the user data is backed up; the machine can be rebuilt on a whim. (not that this stops me from trying to identify and solve issues before resorting to reinstall)

I am constantly adding and removing things, either in response to a unique one-time requirements or simply to evaluate a tool. And my corp. client team doesn't cater to the individual user by doing things like taking a system image. It is a cookie cutter approach where you are provided with a PC with MS office on it and maybe a few other standard tools like terminal emulation programs. Their attitude is if they don't offer it, you don't need it! It is the same mentality that leads them to believe that the correct solution to every issue is to restage the client.

The hard party might be getting approval for a second license to install inside the VM but it would give you a simple way to run your custom apps on top of the stock image. Then you just have to keep your own backup of the VM and manually install the VM app in the event of a host OS re-image.

Not sure if it'd work for you but it may help if your rebuilding that often. Especially with restore points for the VM if it's your extra apps that cause the issue.

Lazy OEMs leverage "restore" disks (that wipe and re-build the PC) to attain 1-call and zero-call support loads, despite selling on the basis of "excellent support". The "1-call" version goes like this:
- "just" wipe and rebuild
- only if that fails, consider bad hardware
- the adverse impact will prevent the user ever calling again

A refinement is the 0-call version:
- advise the user on the phone to "just" wipe and rebuild
- if they refuse, end of call (zero call load)
- if the rebuild fails, issue RMA and consider bad hardware
- adverse impact assures they will never call again

"Just" wipe and rebuild doesn't keep the PC malware-free either; as soon as "data" is restored, or the unpatched PC connects to the 'net, it's likely to be re-infected just as it was originally.

Restoring "data" isn't safe when apps default to "My Documents" for downloads and other incoming crud (e.g. "My Recieved Files").

This is not always true. My home pc is restarted once a month. I use this pc daily at night and suspend / Hibernate the pc only every single day. I restart only when new updates, required or after software install, etc.

In the other side, my office PC needs to be restarted twice a day, sometimes more.

My home pc is Windows 7 64bits. Office pc is XP pro.