Well, my computer is getting pretty full. I was foolish enough to divide it's space into two smaller spaces when I initialized it after purchase. It has two partitions under Windows XP. But along with that, I also have a whole 'nother system as well, which is Linux: Ubuntu. I enjoy using both, and go back and forth between them.
Well... My XP side has gotten pretty full in it's little 20Gb total partitions, and I think that has been slowing down the performance. Maybe I remember incorrectly, but I seem to recall this thing being pretty zippy when I first got it. I think there's a lot of system clutter on it as well, though, and for you tech people who know that computer speed largely doesn't depend on disk space, yes.. I know that too. But isn't there caching or something like that? System clutter. Yeah, I blame it on that. All those programs I've installed, and deleted.. or half deleted.
So I feel the strong urge to re-initialize my drive, and to re-install both XP and Ubuntu as well. Trouble is.. all those files that I want to save, like Trillian conversations, Thunderbird e-mail, music, (photos are already backed up). Isolating and backing up all that stuff just takes too much time and effort. I may just grit my teeth and do it. Ahh... computers.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
May I recomend a defrag? If it is not a regular part of your system maintenance, it takes longer to allocate swap space, and to swap out memory, and can effect the speed of your system.
For the uninstalled/removed programs, I would look for a registry cleaner. All those apps leave stuff in your registry, and your registry is loaded into memory, and the size of your registry can impact the speed of your system.
If you have tons of systray apps running, that can put a strain on your memory too. Use Ctrl+Alt+Del to get to Task Manager and look through the list of running processes to see if there are things running that you don't need. If you are not sure what some are, just google the process name to get more info.
Firefox extensions will add significantly to the memory footprint of Firefox. Slim down those extensions to get back to a snappy browsing experience.
Create a local Thunderbird archive mailbox that you only connect to in order to archive old email. That will make Thunderbird load, and run faster, and take less memory.
Hey thanks tech_sam! I probably did a registry-cleaning-overkill, as I tried about 5-8 programs. Found two good free ones. I do think that my computer is running faster now. The defragging also went well, but my primary partition has only 3% room left on it! Secondary has about 9%. Still getting pretty lean, eh?
I've done the ctrl-alt-del thing a few times, and it's pretty hard to tell on a lot of them. Particularly with the ones that are exactly the same name. egh. I've looked them up though, and I don't think I've any that are in excess anymore. Yay for trimming down.
If you want to know what cleaner(s) I ended up happy with using, just let me know. My firefox isn't slow at all, once it is running. The startup is a bit sluggish, but I think that is probably the extensions. It zips along fine aside from that. Thanks for the suggestion though!
As to a local T-bird archive mailbox, I'll reserve that for another day (maybe next weekend) as that will take more time to actually sort through and decide what I don't want to keep on the 'surface'. I've waay too many e-mails that I want to respond to. Lifehacker offers some great strategies as to time management, and I'll start narrowing those down before too long.
Thanks again for the advice. have a merry merry.
Post a Comment