And if they get a new laptop with Win7
The sleep mode works great with laptops
I hardly ever shut mine off.
I close the lid, open it, in seconds I get my login prompt put in my
password and I'm good to go.
Also win7 will boot faster.
However "UPGRADE" Doesn't solve many issues
Probably too much #@$#$ loaded
on startup like Updates and toolbars (How many toolbars does one need?)
Russ
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On Wed, 3 Feb 2010 13:58:20 -0000, "KRK"
Hello,
I have a Toshiba laptop with 2Gb Ram, running Vista. I have no major
problems, but my pc does seem to take a long time to start up
My personal view is that the attention many people pay to how long it
takes to boot is unwarranted. Assuming that the computer's speed is
otherwise satisfactory, it is not generally 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.
However if you do want to address it, it may be because of what
programs start automatically, and you may want to stop some of them
from starting that way. 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 with google searches and asking 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.
and to load /
run large files, and sometimes seems to go into a coma.
To me, those are much more significant issues.
I use CCleaner and
What do you do with CCleaner? In my view, it's a good program as long
as you do *not* use its registry cleaning feature.
Registry cleaning programs are *all* snake oil. Cleaning of the
registry isn't needed and is dangerous. Leave the registry alone and
don't use any registry cleaner. Despite what many people think, and
what vendors of registry cleaning software try to convince you of,
having unused registry entries doesn't really hurt you.
The risk of a serious problem caused by a registry cleaner erroneously
removing an entry you need is far greater than any potential benefit
it may have.
Read
http://www.edbott.com/weblog/archives/000643.html
Defraggler, and I uninstall/delete anything that I dont need. But my
pc
does
seem to be struggling sometimes.
I could add another 2Gb Ram,
How much RAM you need for good performance is *not* a
one-size-fits-all situation. You get good performance if the amount of
RAM you have keeps you from using the page file significantly, and
that depends on what apps you run. Most people running a typical range
of business applications under XP find that somewhere around 512MB
works well, others need more. Almost anyone will see poor performance
with less than 256MB. Some people, particularly those doing things
like editing large photographic images, can see a performance boost by
adding even more than 512MB--sometimes much more.
If you are currently using the page file significantly, more memory
will decrease or eliminate that usage, and improve your performance.
If you are not using the page file significantly, more memory will do
nothing for you. Go to
http://billsway.com/notes_public/winxp_tweaks/ and download
WinXP-2K_Pagefile.zip and monitor your page file usage. That should
give you a good idea of whether more memory can help, and if so, how
much more.
or I could upgrade to Windows 7 (which I read
has much lower overheads ?? ) .
The worst time to do an upgrade is when you are having problems. With
problems, upgrading is more likely to exacerbate the problems than to
cure them.
Or perhaps I should buy a new PC ?
Wow! That's a very extreme step to take. Although it would probably
solve your problem, my guess is that, since you wouldn't know what
caused the problem, you would quickly repeat the behavior that caused
it and find yourself back where you started.
My question is, how do I decide what the best route is ??
Perhaps the most common cause of poor performance these days is
malware infection, and your first step should be to make sure you are
not infected. What anti-virus and anti-spyware programs do you run?
Are they kept up to date?
