SWMBO's laptop, a Compaq Armada E500 with 512MB RAM, 900MHz processor, and ten gig disk running Windows 2000 Professional, has started to get slower and slower of late, so I had a tinker last night.
The disk was at about 90% capacity, so I used the appropriate uninstall routines to remove all programmes no longer used, deleted all the documents that we have backed up on multiple CDs anyway, and then emptied the recycle bin. The disk was then just 44% used.
Result.
I thought.
Having done this, I then performed a full defrag, as the disk was seen to be horribly fragmented as expected.
Unfortunately, the laptop now has the performance of a snail, and is far, far, worse than before I started, to the point of being unusable.
I have heard that removing software often leaves unused registry entries behind, with the result being an unholy mess, so has any BRer got experience to share of a good cleanup tool, please? I'd rather go down this route than re-installing Windows, and all the hassle that that implies.
Cheers!
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From experience i find that a complete reload is required every two years - (altho better) even with win2k or xp.
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Painfully slow PC - if it's slow when you log on or try to browse to something then DNS is broken. Unlikely, but does bring proceedings to a halt if it's ill.
Have a look at the eventlogs
START - Run - eventvwr (press return)
and see if that helps. If anything is dragging it down, then you'll find errors and warnings here, be sure to check each reporting area. You can usually pinpoint the problem by searching Google groups with the error message (and error codes).
You might end up having to edit the registry. Be careful, one slipped DEL and you could properly break your computer.
HTH,
--
Lee
MINI adventure in progress
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Don't forget to look in task manager and sort items by cpu percentage to see if any application is hogging the machine.
Common issues:
Helper apps like Microsoft findfast (the computer equivalent of a chocolate teapot) in the startup folder.
Misbehaving AV programs
Badly written viruses that don't know how to hide themselves ( these are unlikely to be as helpful as appear in task manager)
Generally defragging will only give a small percentage increase in performance, it is no longer as important as it used to be five or more years ago.
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Try using msconfig which helped me a lot a few weeks back. Although I uninstall everything properly, it still tries to start-up accoring the msconfig.
I know that Windows 2000 doesnt' technically have it but you can copy it from a 98 or XP machine. Saves me messing around in the registry to just modify simple things.
Adam
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Many thanks everyone for the advice generously given, all of it noted.
Full version of RegClean running on my wife's laptop as I write this. Will post the outcome, and whether I end up following any further steps.
Cheers for now.
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I don't see how uninstalled software with orphaned registry entries can affect a system (well, maybe a little at boot up time...).
With disk speeds these days, few disks with sufficient free space will not give noticeably slow performance, even if badly fragmented.
My guess is that there is something hogging. As mentioned above, look at the task list and see what's using the CPU.
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One thought: did the defragging get halted before it was finished?
If you stop a defragging part of the pay through you could end up with a more fragmented disk than before you started.
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One thought: did the defragging get halted before it was finished?
Thanks for the suggestion, but no, defrag was not interrupted. It ran to normal completion in just under an hour.
Well, you can see by the time of posting that things could be going better. SWMBO is in the land of Nod, and I'm performing heart surgery on the laptop!
Unfortunately, no amount of registry editing did anything to improve performance. It didn't get any worse, and no errors occurred after reboot, but neither did it get any better, despite over 1000 entries having been removed.
Task Manager shows nothing untoward, there being no dodgy looking processes, no duplicated processes like some viruses manifest as, and no rampant CPU usage. On the virus front, Norton Antivirus is bang up to date thanks to Live Update, and a full scan found zilch.
Event Viewer gave thousands of entries, but having grouped them, all proved irrelevant to my problems. Just to be sure, I purged the log, and performed a shutdown and restart. Five new entries appeared, but all were innocent.
I've had enough, so...
Having proven that my CD-ROM is a bootable drive - it is - I would like to format the disk completely, and start again from scratch by upgrading to XP on Saturday.
Because the laptop was purchased second hand from my employer however, I have no diskettes or CDs of any nature for it, and being three years old now, neither do they. Whilst the registry tools were running on SWMBO's laptop, I spent an age this evening trawling the internet for a suitable boot disk, including from Compaq, but drew a blank. By boot disk I mean a disk to boot to A: from where I can format C. I don't mean a boot disk that allows booting from a CD-ROM, coz as I wrote, the BIOS already supports that.
To lean on my kind helpers once more, please can I be advised how to create the bootable floppy I need?
Many thanks again.
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Easiest way is to download a boot disk from www.bootdisk.com/
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If you've got all your data safe elsewhere and are happy to clean the disk, boot from the XP install disk. Be sure to have passwords & settings for email, Internet, software licence keys safe too.
XP Install gives you the option to reset your partitions before install. Delete the existing partitions, create new one(s) and then XP will ask you to format using a file system.
Unless you're dual-booting 98 (can't think why you would) choose NTFS.
Presto! Clean disk.
Good luck,
--
Lee
MINI adventure in progress
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You can create a boot disk from Windows itself:
Start>Settings>Control Panel>double click the Add Remove programs icon>click the Startup Disk and create disk.
If you are going to install XP don't forget SP2 (Service Pack 2) - you don't need to worry about SP1 as a) it's incorporated into recent new copies of XP and b) SP2 includes SP1 in any case.
To save a massive download from WindowsUpdate of SP2 when you have installed XP, most computer magazines' coming issues will include it on their cover disks.
Whether you are intending to run a network or not, get XP Pro if possible as it is superior in several areas to XP Home. You may not need the features now but may well in the future.
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Thanks for the advice I've just read.
I have indeed purchased XP Professional, but somehow have managed to install it as well as, not instead of, Windows 2000 Professional! Duh. Guess I didn't answer one of the partition questions like I thought I did, as when I now boot, I am asked to choose the o/s I want.
Amazingly, both work: Windows 2000 Professional is still slow as to be expected, but XP Professional is extremely fast, and I have a built desktop and tool bar in next to no time. Everything seems to work, including connection to my Netgear Router.
The downside of course is that the HDD is now very full again, so having proven that I am likely to benefit from a new o/s installation, I'd like to wipe the C drive and start again.
I went to www.bootdisk.com - thank you - and have downloaded several DOS self extracting exes, which one-by-one as each didn't work I have then unpacked on to a floppy. The problem I have is that when booting to the 'A' drive, which every boot disk has successfully done, I can't use the format command: I can type 'FORMAT' or 'FORMAT C' or 'FORMAT C:' but always get the message "Invalid drive specification". What is even more odd is that the backslash key fails to work, so I can't try 'FORMAT C:\'
I'm sorry to ask for more help, but where am I likely going wrong with my boot disk, please?
Thank you as always.
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S O R T E D ! :-))
I share what I did below, both to thank those who helped me - cheers guys, I appreciated your time hugely - and hoping that it can save anyone in the future with the same problem, the pain, albeit some self inflicted, that I went through.
After trawling through pages and pages of hits from Google, I came across the following page that had the answer I needed, and which negated the need to reformat:
www.cyberwalker.net/faqs/reinstall-reformat-winxp/...l
Although the article is aimed at cleaning up a second copy of XP, whereas I had one copy of XP and one of W2K, the principle proved the same. I followed the second of the two options given, namely "Fast but Tricky", and found that as well as being very fast, it was anything but tricky: With care, and sitting by myself with no distraction this time, it was very, very, easy.
I now have a machine with no unwanted clutter on the disk, faster boot-up than it ever had - even when new with OEM Windows 2000 Professional - and lightning fast reactions when any operation is performed on it.
Now to get Norton Antivirus with live update reinstalled, and SWMBO can then get back to her university studies she will use it for.
Cheers!
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Forgot to add:
Thankfully, we have ADSL, so SP2 is downloading as I write this.
I'll leave it running for however long it takes, whilst I go and enjoy the motorbike and then a nice glass or two of Chateau Neuf in the garden.
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50 minutes to an hour. About 14 hours on dialup...:-)
The 276MB version of SP2 covers all flavours of XP - versions due or already out for Home, Pro etc are about 80MB.
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Good to hear..:-)
A couple of small points. AVG's free version of its anti-virus utility (www.grisoft.com) is every bit as good as Norton I've found and, secondly, hard drives are so cheap now that it might be worth using your current one just to act as a backup.
120 to 160 GB hard drives are around £50 to £60 at present and you can even get 200 or 250 GB versions for not all that much more...
I paid £66 for a 6.4 GB HDD four years ago and the same price last year for a 60 GB Western Digital WD600JB - within a fortnight it was offered at the same price in 80 GB form.
The JB by the way indicates that the warranty is for three rather than one year - Western Digital has now altered its warranty conditions and in general HDDs in retail kit form have a one year warranty and OEM versions three years..:-)
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I think this is a laptop for which hard drives are less cheap
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You are right - long time since I first read the original yesterday...:-)
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