After Hours

This sounds less than technical..but a good machine is a clean machine.I notice throughout the years MS is less likely to crash and hang if you just simply keep it clean.Start with your browser,use a good quality browser not necessarly the one that came with it!!Set the ceche to empty when closing,empty cookies,names etc (this is good security practice anyway)On Ms undertake virus and malware scans once a week.Clean out junk especially after loading and uninstalling new programes.Failing this get Unix!!

It looks like the article was written several years ago. SPYWARE & VIRUSES are the number 1 and 2 reasons for a slow P/C, and they are not even on the list!!!!! How Sad

You posted it before I did. But I agree! Viruses and spywareare the FIRST things we check for.

you failed to mention the second and third and so on, please do

talking about WinNT as much as it does dates the article, and then a few random mentions of XP without really going into it.

FACT, there would be a different list for nt, 2k, and XP as they all have their own quirks.

The bad thing about much of the malware and viruses out there now, it more and more becomes the only way to "fix" the system is to format. Sure, you can get the virus off, but it is so unstable afterwards that you would have been best to go straight to the format.

You're correct. Spyware and viruses should be on the list.

Thanks for the feedback.

I've added a spyware and viruses section to the list.

Thanks to everyone for their feedback.

Along with SPYWARE & VIRUSES comes the user not cleaning their machines defrag as well as disk clean. I have heard that you only need to defrag your drives or disk clean once a month. I have been cleaning and defraging my old machines over the years daily, so far not a problem with speed and access. As a user you have to tune your machines just like a car. Norton and McAfee also slow down computers, although a must have anti-virus software these two seem to really slow machines down. Also in the systems managment utilities all of the managing programs can cause system slowdown. I have personally shut a lot of that logging stuff down and my machine has raped access and loadtime. Forget dialup and get DSL, system registry programs can be tweaked. There are several ways to tweak your system. Software programs that virtually do it for you. If you have questions or need good free downloads for systems tweaking. salinascjohn@aol.com