Keep that old PC in good shape
Have you noticed that your computer that seemed so fast seems to be slower and slower. Thats probably because it is!
Make sure you have free space
The slowest component in modern computer is by far the Hard Disk Drive (HDD). When you open a document then the computer reads it from HDD and puts it to RAM. When you save document it will be saved to HDD again. With time you HDD gets filled up with data and it takes longer for it to find or save your data.
Try to keep at least 10-20% of your drive free. Filled up HDD makes your computer more slower than you might think of. You might say that you need everything and can’t free up space. Well, you can. Here are some tips how you can free up some (sometimes a lot) space.
1. Turn off or reduce System Restore quota.
Right click on My Computer, select properties and from top select System restore tab. To turn off System restore just select the checkbox. If you want to keep the system restore then reduce the disk space then just click on the drive in bottom of the window and klick settings. New windows appears where you can set the precentage of the space used for System Restore. The default value is 12% which is nonsense! I would recommend to set it to 2-3%. That should be more than enough. Now click OK. If you have more than one hard drive repeat this step to all of them.When you are donw click OK again. If you turned off the system restore then you will be asked if you are sure thats what you wanted to do. You are 
This step probably frees up several gigabytes on your drive.
If you are not sure what you are doing then don’t turn it off but just decrease space reserved for system restore to 2-3%!
Here is a description of what the windows system restore is in Wikipedia.
2. Use Disk Cleanup tool.
Right click on your HDD in My Computer and select Properties. Now click Disc Cleanup. Depending on your computer it might take from few minutes to hours (usually not more than 15 minutes) to calculate how and how much space could be saved. After you have patiently waited new window with list of things that can be safely deleted and how much space you gain by doing so. At the bottom of the list is item called Compress old files that is not checked by default but usually it can free up a lot of space. The name says pretty much what it does – compresses the files on your drive that you haven’t used for a long time. You can safely do that because todays computers are so fast that it virtually has no effect on computer speed. You can still open, edit or delete your files exactly as befor. In fact you don’t even know if the files is packed afterwards. Note though that it takes a long time to pack the files (migh be hours) so do this when you can leave computer running on its own. Click OK to start the process.
3. Delete temp files.
During working windows creats temporary files. Unfortunahem sometimes it doesn’t delete them afterwards. In time it adds up to a huge amount of useless files taking up a lot of space. You can safely delete them – the files that your computer is currently used just can’t be deleted.
Temp files are located here: C:\Documents and SettingsusernameLocal SettingsTemp
Instead of username you have to use yor windows username. If you don’t know your username click start and in bottom of the list there should be line like Log off “you username”.
Select all files in temp folder and delete them. Its normal that during deletion windows says that some files can’t be deleted. Its because they are beeing used by Windows. When that happens try to delete few files at the time to find which files you can delete.
Defragment your hard drive
Hard drive consits of tiny blocks where the data can be saved. Each file takes several blocks. Ideally one file is written to the blocks next to each other – then the saving and reading of the file is faster. But if there aren’t big enough sequence of free blocks then the file must be split into several spaces. In this case it takes longer to read or write file because computer has to search for all the blocks and put the pieces back together. Its called fragmention and it hapens in every computer over time. Its less likely to happen if you have lots of free space.
Defragmention is procedure to collect all the pieces of each file and put them together so it would be faster to read them next time. Windows XP has built in tool to do that. There are many other programs in internet to do that. Many of them cost money so for average user the built in defragmenter will do the job.
To defragment your hard drive open My Computer and right click on your hard drive (usuall c:) then from the pop up menu choose properties. Next choose tools tab from the top and then click defragment now button. New window opens displaying your dirve(s). Click on the drive you want to defragment and then click defragment on bottom of the screen.
If you have lesst than 15% of your hard drive free then you will be warned that its best to have more free space (defragmention is more effective if you have lots of free space). You can click that you want to defragment anyway. Defragmention takes a long time and usually it doesn’t defragment your drive perfectly in the first time if you haven’t defragmented in long time. Feel free to defragment several times. Its not a very good idea to defragment daily or weekly because of extra stress that it puts to your hard drive. I’d say no more than once a month is necessary.
Tags: cleanup
Computer tips | Timo | 
December 2, 2009 00:46 | 
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