PT said:
My Windows XP Home computer is four years old. It works, but has
become increasingly sluggish.
A quick Google on “slow computer performance” yields a modest 35
million hits, Most are for alleged registry fixes, and I suspect that
at least 34.99 million are virus/Trojan plantings or otherwise
worthless.
So what I'm wondering, after all these years, is there an acknowledged
effective tool for cleanup?
If so, what is it?
And by whom/where has it been tested and its effectiveness verified?
Don't confuse cleaning up temp files with running some program that
claims to speed up your PC by "cleaning up" unused registry entries. The
latter is not needed; registry "cleaners" don't yield any appreciable
performance improvement and whenever you run them, you run the risk of
doing serious damage to your PC!
For cleaning up temp files, Windows XP's own Disk Cleanup is effective:
http://www.theeldergeek.com/disk_cleanup_utility.htm
If you want a more thorough method of doing this, one which can clean
*all* profiles at once, Ccleaner is a fine program (but it's not
absolutely necessary; Disk Cleanup is more than adequate):
http://www.ccleaner.com/
Oddly enough, Ccleaner has a registry cleaning component. Just don't use
that component!
To address your sluggishness, here are its typical causes:
1. Malicious software (malware). You need to rule this out first! This
page has excellent information:
http://www.elephantboycomputers.com/page2.html#Viruses_Malware
2. Certain programs that are designed to combat malware (e.g., Norton
and McAfee). Ironically, they can slow things down because they simply
use way too many resources. Sometime they cause conflicts with other
programs. And their default mode is to scan your entire hard drive each
time you boot up. Fortunately, there are other antimalware programs
available that use far fewer resources (e.g., NOD32, Avast, and Avira).
3. Too many of *certain types* of programs always running in the
background -- with or without your knowledge. (Then again, many programs
that run in the background have trivial consequences.)
To determine every program and process you are currently running, use
the Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del) and click the Processes tab. You should
be able to sort by CPU usage or Memory usage to get a good ideas which
ones are the resource/memory hogs. You should write down the names of
all the processes for future detective work (or take a snapshot and
print it out).
Use these sites to determine what these programs are and to learn how to
configure them not to always run at startup:
http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_content.php#THE_PROGRAMS
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/startups/
http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist.htm
Sometimes it is recommended to use msconfig to configure the programs to
not run at startup. A better, more thorough program is Autoruns:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx
But before you do this, you should use the preference settings of the
program in question. Otherwise, for some programs, they will return to
the startup list anyway!
If you do wish to use msconfig, it may be accessed this way:
Start | Run | type "msconfig" (without the quotation marks) | Enter (or
OK)
4. Not enough RAM, which causes the PC to overly rely on the pagefile. A
quick way to determine if this is happening is to open Task Manager
(Ctrl+Alt+Del) and click the Performance tab. Then note the three values
under Commit Charge (K): in the lower left-hand corner: Total, Limit,
and Peak.
The Total figure represents the amount of memory you are using at that
very moment. The Peak figure represents the highest amount of memory you
used since last bootup. If both these figures are below the value of
Physical Memory (K) Total, then you probably have plenty of RAM.
In case you want to explore this further, you may run Page File Monitor
for Windows XP:
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_pagefilemon.htm
5. You might also want to check that your hard drive's access mode
didn't change from DMA to PIO:
http://www.technize.com/2007/08/02/is-your-hard-disk-cddvd-drives-too-slow-while-copying/
and
http://users.bigpond.net.au/ninjaduck/itserviceduck/udma_fix/