In
Ben Hardy said:
No, you misunderstand. Hard drive space is not the issue here.
My concern is the gradual slowdown of the OS.
It doesn't matter from that perspective either. The size of the
registry doesn't affect the speed of your computer.
For what is basically a text file, 42Mb is rather large.
No, it's typical of the size of teh reistry, as I tried to point
out by comparing it my mine.
What I'm trying to get to the bottom of here is (1) Why the OS
slows
down over time.
It doesn't. If it does in your case, it's not the nature of the
operating system, but is because of other factors. For example,
do you regularly scan for spyware and other malware with
*several* up-to-date programs?
(2) Is there a way to solve it other than by a format and
re-install.
Is the fact that a 42Mb file has to be read initially anything
to do
with very slow start-up.
No. As I said, that's not a big file at all.
Even if it contributed to a slow startup, don't mix up slow
starting with slow running; they are not necessarily related.
My personal view is that the attention many people pay to how
long it takes to boot is unwarranted. Assuming that the speed is
otherwise satisfactory, it may not be worth worrying about. Most
people start their computers once a day or even less frequently.
In the overall scheme of things, even a few minutes to start up
isn't very important. Personally I power on my computer when I
get up in the morning, then go get my coffee. When I come back,
it's done booting. I don't know how long it took to boot and I
don't care.
On the other hand, if you're running slow all the time, there's a
problem that needs addressing.
If you browse the web you'll find very many comments about XP
(and
other Windows OSs)
gradually slowing down after a few months of use
Remember that newsgroups like this one and other online forums
are places where people come to look for help when they
experience problems. Yes, there are some with such problems, but
newsgroups have a dispropotionately high percentage of them.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that this is necessarily
something everyone experiences. I don't, for example.
and they all suggest
that that the only cure is
a format & re-install
"They"? Who are "they"? I vehemently disagree. In my view, this
often-repeated mantra is almost always a mistake. With a modicum
of care, it should never be necessary to reinstall Windows (XP or
any other version). I've run Windows 3.0, 3.1, WFWG 3.11, Windows
95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows XP, each for the period
of time before the next version came out, and each on two
machines here. I never reinstalled any of them, and I have never
had anything more than an occasional minor problem.
It's my belief that this mistaken notion stems from the technical
support people at many of the larger OEMs. Their solution to
almost any problem they don't quickly know the answer to is
"reformat and reinstall." That's the perfect solution for them.
It gets you off the phone quickly, it almost always works, and it
doesn't require them to do any real troubleshooting (a skill that
most of them obviously don't possess in any great degree).
But it leaves you with all the work and all the problems. You
have to restore all your data backups, you have to reinstall all
your programs, you have to reinstall all the Windows and
application updates,you have to locate and install all the needed
drivers for your system, you have to recustomize Windows and all
your apps to work the way you're comfortable with.
Besides all those things being time-consuming and troublesome,
you may have trouble with some of them: can you find all your
application CDs? Can you find all the needed installation codes?
Do you have data backups to restore? Do you even remember all the
customizations and tweaks you may have installed to make
everything work the way you like?
Occasionally there are problems that are so difficult to solve
that Windows should be reinstalled cleanly. But they are few and
far between; reinstallation should not be a substitute for
troubleshooting; it should be a last resort, to be done only
after all other attempts at troubleshooting by a qualified person
have failed.
I don't know what you've tried so far to address your problems,
but I would look primarily at two things:
1. The possibility of malware on your system.
2. The list of what background programs start automatically when
you boot. Here's my standard advice on the subject:
Despite what many people tell you, you should be concerned, not
with how many of these programs you run, but which. Some of them
can hurt performance severely, but others have no effect on
performance.
Don't just stop programs from running willy-nilly. What you
should do is determine what each program is, what its value is to
you, and what the cost in performance is of its running all the
time. You can get more information about these with at
http://castlecops.com/StartupList.html. If you can't find it
there, try google searches and ask about specifics here.
Once you have that information, you can make an intelligent
informed decision about what you want to keep and what you want
to get rid of.
