How do I know what I can/should stop running to get a faster P.C ?

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I know I should stop some things from running but how do I know which ones
are safe/will not stop other things working/will ACTUALLY make it better? Is
there a `general list'- you know the sort of thing - games will slow it down,
files with all your letters in, won't, but all those pictures you kept from
hols in Spain will reeaally slow it down. I know it's easy to say just
delete everything I've put in/on but it's been along time now and I've
forgotten where some of it even came from!!
- Does all the time wasting energy busting useless stuff have a `common'
denominator of any kind? - or is that just too easy?
Kassiopea
 
kassiopea said:
I know I should stop some things from running
Click to expand...


No, not necessarily. Read below.

but how do I know which
ones are safe/will not stop other things working/will ACTUALLY make
it better?
Click to expand...


An excellent question. Here's my standard post on this subject:

On each program you don't want to start automatically, check its Options to
see if it has the choice not to start (make sure you actually choose the
option not to run it, not just a "don't show icon" option). Many can easily
and best be stopped that way. If that doesn't work, run MSCONFIG from the
Start | Run line, and on the Startup tab, uncheck the programs you don't
want to start automatically.

However, if I were you, I wouldn't do this just for the purpose of running
the minimum number of programs. 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 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.
 
I know I should stop some things from running but how do I know which ones
are safe/will not stop other things working/will ACTUALLY make it better? Is
there a `general list'- you know the sort of thing - games will slow it down,
http://www.castlecops.com/StartupList.html

files with all your letters in, won't, but all those pictures you kept from
hols in Spain will reeaally slow it down. I know it's easy to say just
Click to expand...

You are comparing oranges and tires

Your computer runs slower when a lot of programs that are not
needed are put in memory at startup - see the link above

Simply having files on your hard drive makes little difference
(this is, of course, apart from the issue of fragmentation and
the read/write head having to search all over the drive to get
the parts of a file loaded)

Think of your hard drive as a storage closet

When you take several items out of the closet (ie load them
into memory) you are going to move slower, as you juggle the
items, compared to just having one or two items in your hand

The fact that you may have 20 (or 200 or 2000) more items in
the closet (ie on the hard drive) really does not make you
move slower as you walk from closet to kitchen

Not an exact example... but close enough
 
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