Keep your PC up to Speed (A Basic Guide)
 

OK dudes,

So when your 'monster' of an old PC feels like its underperforming, the Hard Disk (Thats where you store your porn for the young PC-illiterate males. Or where you store your photos, music, videos and applications for the rest of the PC-illiterate population) is more often than not, to blame. Like most things on the planet from the minute your Hard Drive is born, it starts its journey down the long path to failure. While on the outside, it appears than the Hard Drive is the most robust component in your PC (How many people have acctually had to upgrade their hard drive due to Failure rather than storage space? - Not many) They do have a habit of just lingering on and on where as once most components just go kaput once they have had enough!

Before blaming your Hard Drive entirely though, there are some FREE things you can do to help your PC run smoothly. you should make sure you PC meets most, if not all of the following basic requirements. Its prbably also worthwhile noting that these requirements are based on my opinions and experiences, rather than fact (if that even exsists in computing terminology).

1. You PC is up to date with all the patches microsoft throw at you.
As much as you might hate microsoft and not want anything more to do with them, these patches are them trying to fix there mistakes, best to let them just do it!

2. If you are using Internet Explorer, stop, download Firefox!
While IE is starting to look and behave more and more like firefox everyday, it will never be Firefox and thus it will always be out of date!

3. AVG Antivirus, i dont care if you pay a monthly fee for your Norton/Symantec/McAfee updates. AVG Antivirus!
Depending how much you use your PC, you should try to run virus scans daily (or nightly). AVG can run a low priority scan while you work at the PC which shouldnt affect your productivity.

4. Defragment your Hard Drive (What the...?)
While you run programs, save photos etc etc data is constantly being shifted around the Hard Disk and where there is not space for a full chunks of data to be stored neatly in sequencem, it must be split into blocks and spread out as close together as it can be on the Disk... Hey presto, its fragmented and all you did was move a photo!

Windows has a build in Disk Defragmenter, it can be found in Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Disk Defragmenter or by clicking Start>Run and typing "defrag". You should make a point of runing the defragmenter every month or 2. It really does make a difference!

Also as a side note, you should have at least 15% free space to run the defragmenter and similarly you should try to keep that 15% free at all times for Windows run smoothly.

5. Adaware. If you use firefox and are behind a router then most of the harmful junk will never reach you, in the past few years i've only run a handful of scans with adaware and the only "threats" it has found have been harmless cookies! If however you are following this guide, then you should definatly run a full scan now!

Once your all kitted up though then do a scan every month or so just to make sure things are keeping clean!


Now that all that is done there is a benchmark program you can run called Crystal Mark. It tests your PC under various conditions and will give you a way of directly comparing your PC to someone elses rather than all of this "mines a 4Ghz quadcore doohicky and your is only a 3.2Ghz dualcore hyperthreader!" nonsense!


I touched on Hard Drives being the main fault above, which is what initially spurred me to write a little guide about benchmarking your Hard Drive and it soon turned into everything you have just read!
CrystalDiskMark will benchmark just your hardrives read and write speeds. I just bought some new Hard Drives for my File Server and noticed a massive improvement over the drives which were removed, dispite these drives only being a couple years old they only manage around a 40MB/s sequential read/write where as the new drives are pulling off 90MB/s. So in 2 years the draves have lost half their effieciency! Pretty poor tbh.

Well i know noone asked for this and i dont know why i wrote it but i did and its done, hopefully some people will benefit from it!

Mystic :)



Heres a list of direct download links for the above, incase you struggle finding them on the websites, the Crystal mark website, especially is an awkward one!

1. Firefox
2. AVG Antivirus
3. AdAware
4. Crystal Mark
5. Crystal Disk Mark

If anyone feels like ive missed somethiing important or something needs a better explanation let me know and i'll add it.

Also If you run the benchmarks programs and upload screenshots/results to this thread then you can see how your PC is doing compared to the rest of the SAXP population!

Nice guide Mystic,
should be a sticky imo.

Agree tbh, seriously good guide. Thank god my PC is a works PC and they do it all for me.
Firefox FTW :y:
Would rep you but it wont let me :(

hero. mystic for IT mod.

i blame mine now running slow on porn

nice mate, reppage :)

De-fragmenting it i know makes a fair old difference, Good guide :y:

good work mysty. my pc is on its last legs now. making funny noises and everything.

hello macbook.

Mac FTW

is this coming at the same time as the 360elite and ps3?

I use this piece of software.. www.litepc.com

chops out all the crap from windows making it incredible stable

feeling a little more brave... make a new install CD and never load any of the rubbish in the first place

www.nliteos.com <--- only recommended if you are pretty savvy with the computer!

decided against ps3 now.

but yes possibley.

Adaware is a nice bit of kit, good post.

Spybot Search & Destroy is also another good free scanner.

AVG is good, but i found it slowed my PC down, takes longer to boot.

Great thread, thanks alot mate :y: Repped ;)

A good registry cleaner can fix many problems and speed up boot up times quite a lot

Clean My PC REGISTRY CLEANER <<--- is what i use

Needs a defrag as all my games have been moved the otherday, but not got round to it lately.

But for the other stuff, I'm not sure if it's anygood? Never used this package before. :)

www.opera.com/products/desktop/
www.hitmanpro.nl
www.ccleaner.com

do you need tp back anything up when you de-frag it? im assuming not but might be worth clarifying

Nope, but I personally just make sure I'm not doing much on the PC at the time it's defragmenting. Speeds it up, and it's more efficient because you won't be using temporary files. :cool:

I would be cautious of registry cleaners, They could remove important keys.
As far as I'm aware the registry doesn't store any type of creation or access dates so these pieces of software have to guess whats not important.

Having old, useless registry entries won’t slow your pc down, but removing them can help prevent any software issues you might have encountered if not removed.

Trial - Register Programs:
Speedupmypc3 +
RegistryBooster2

Ad-aware2007 +

Free apps:
Spybot search and destroy
Adaware personal se

I've got the above top 3 and have no problems. all i get once a week is cookies and few trackers. Which are cleaned and removed each time i scan. PC runs perfectly.
Use these along with what is said in the first post. I.e your anti virus software and also your defrag etc your computer should be fine! :)

Avast is abit better then AVG as its more secure, but avast does always pester you on things were as AVG just sits in the background doing its own little thing. abit better secure though i think.

Good guide mate !

..also i know this is really covered in the defraging as it asks if you want to get rid of the temp files etc...but also if not defraging you can clean disk using disk clean up under >accessories > System tools > disk clean up.

More advanced users can disable unneeded services too, like the print spooler service (unless you do a lot of printing).

I did a fresh install of XP and disabled everything that wasn't needed, had it down to 16 processes as standard, boots in seconds rather than minutes.

msconfig command is also worth mentioning to disable problems / sartup programs you dont want, also speeds up loading the desktop

you may also want to add 'wise registry cleaner' to this
a simple little program that sorts out mishmashed files - beter than defragging - i dont care what you say

also - free firewalls like zone alarm - get rid if your router has inbuilt firewall - use it
hardware>software anyday
limewire - get rid - its crap - you will download stuff that harms your pc
the amount of machines i fix on a weekly basis because of limewire is stupid

your computer runs best when windows has just been installed - so the less crap you put on there the faster it goes

my windows has office/nero/itunes installed on my main drive

everything else /games/music/data/pictures/video
all on organised seperate drives

because if you see what is being installed - you get

less chance of malware
less chance of viruses
less chance of headaches

if you know what is on your pc - then you wont need to ask questions about it

oh and if you can - clean and update latest drivers for your hardware at least every two months

i do this every two weeks

i would also reccomend running "reg mechanic"

AVG does that, also when integrated with outlook using pop3 it more or less fucks my pc when it pulls down e-mail from my pop3 server :homme:

But cant argue because its freeeeee

Personally all registry cleaning software is shit imo, if you are downloading one of them you clearly dont know what your doing in the registry, i downloaded one as my mate told me it tries to delete your registry, he was right, it detected almost everything as damaged and to remove it! it was a recommended download from downloads.com too :homme:

Best thing to do is the start up list from all programs and remove anything like itunes and shit from there.

Or if your a little more hardcore start > run >msconfig and remove any start up items, anything you dont know of i would personally leave :y:

Another way of speeding it up is right mouse clicking my computer > properties > advanced > performance settings, select adjust for best performance, then scroll to the bottom of the list and select the bottom 3 ;)

So then you can still keep your lovely theme :P

http://www.blackviper.com/ is essential if you want to have know how to speed your PC up.

Full explanations of everything and how to disable them.

CCleaner is essential to any pc.. Along with everything stated here you should be running a smooth beast of a pc.

also use disk cleanup thats a really good tool to have!

This website is fantastic to check if things are needed or not. http://www.sysinfo.org/startuplist.php

Right ive just gone through the startup part on msconfig and used http://www.sysinfo.org/startuplist.php to get rid of the ones that i didnt need.

Restarted my laptop and it came up with a textbox saying that i should re-tick the prgrams that ive just taken off and put 'normal startup' on... Does that always happen??

also just simply uninstall programs that you dont need! alot of them start at start up to, instead of using msconfig to stop them running why not look to simply uninstall them! obviously some you might still use but im sure theres a few things you could free up memory by deleting...

anyone kknow of a program to find out which processes are being used and wat they are actually doing.. this bugger of mines is runnin 63 but i think it should be runnin about 30 at the most

Windows defender does this i think.

avg works a treat....thanks!