The What-to-do Series: Sluggish PC Performance

Despite your awesome 3Ghz quad-core processor teamed up with 7200 rpm hard disk and 1Gb ram, you still find your system’s performance a tad bit slow off the mark. What might be the culprit? Or more importantly, how can this be rectified? Here are some possible causes of slow windows performance and their respective fixes.

Startup Overload

Startup programs are those that load automatically in the background as Windows starts (and manifests as icons in the right-hand corner of the system tray). Some of which are truly unnecessary and just hogs valuable ram. To disable these unwanted startup items, just click on Start > Run, type ‘msconfig’ and go to the ‘Startup’ tab. You’ll be presebted with a check list of all the programs that automatically runs everytime your computer boots - and it’s safe to un-check Windows messenger, iTunes, or Azureus. You may also deselect programs that give you errors during startup. After reboot and Windows tells you about the changes, just uncheck the notification box then click Ok so it won’t bother you again.

Clean, Defrag, then Scan Combo

I usually do it in that order. First I remove temporary Internet files, downloaded program files, Recycle Bin files,  unused desktop icons, optional unused Windows components, and rarely used programs. Then I defragment the drive so that Windows won’t have a hard time indexing (or labeling) the files. Then I finish it up with a nasty scan disk procedure that will surely get rid of disk errors. Microsoft enumerates the complete step by step procedure right here.

Beware of Spyware

I can’t stress enough how annoying it is to have a spyware or two lodged in between your software dll files. Most of these crapwares victimize our clueless web-surfing grandmas by disguising themselves as valid security programs. These days you can never go wrong with a complete Internet security package rather than buying just an antivirus software. If in case you do have an antivirus suite installed, make sure you also have Ad-Aware in your system. It’s light, easy to use, and it doesn’t cost anything.

Paging file size

You may make the hard drive act as an extension of the RAM by adjusting the Paging file size. By default, its size is equal to 150% of the amount of physical memory. A small paging file limits what can be stored and might exhaust your virtual memory for applications. If you are short on RAM, more paging occurs, which generates extra activity for your disks and slows response times for the system. Aaaaand I know I’m already starting to talk gibberish here. To put it simply, if your computer, say, has 64 megabytes of RAM available for the CPU(urgh!), loading the operating system, an email program, and youtube simultaneously may make the memory say, “Sorry, you can not load any more applications. Please close another application to load a new one.” With virtual memory, what the computer can do is look at RAM for areas that have not been used recently and copy them onto the hard disk. This frees up space in RAM to load the new application. The area of the hard disk that stores the RAM is called the page file (aka “scratch file”).