Comments for What Slows Windows Down?

Of course... Get rid of Norton.

There are so many better AntiVirus packages out there

Are there any solutions to Norton slowing down the sytem or is it something we have to live with?

Of course... Get rid of Norton.
There are so many better AntiVirus packages out there

<p>Yeah... take a look at AV-Comparatives, they have the best analysis of AV protection strength. Thanks to Oli's articles here, it's easy to find a strength/performance combination that suits.
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<p>Oh, and if you're willing to go with a separate AV and firewall, instead of an all-in-one package like Norton, I can't recommend the Comodo & NOD32 combination highly enough!
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After I installed Office 2007 (just Word and Excel mind you) on a clean install of Vista, the Free Memory went from about 380/2045MB to 5. I know that Vista just likes to cache everything, but on rebooting what could Office possible be caching if I've just turned the PC back on. IE7 doesn't just pop-up anymore, there's a short pause. Not sure if I really need a 1.2GB word processor if this is what it does =/

Test the slow down effects of installing the Windows updates and service packs.

The fonts slowing down the computer is very true. And if enough of them are installed it can cause problems when just normally running your pc after the boot. I installed about 70,000 fonts at one time... (Don't ask me why) took about 30 minutes to boot my pc. And it made some programs go haywire, windows flashing everywhere, programs freezing, and general slowdown of processing speed. So, don't install to many fonts...

Things you can do to reduce windows boot time dramaticaly:

Go to C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch and delete it's content. Those are pre-compiled files that get placed there when an application is first run. Windows uses them to open that application faster the next time you run it. The bad thing is, they get processed at boot, and contain a lot of setup.exe shit and other files you'll never run again. So delete this folders content weekly or monthly, depending on your usage. You'll notice a huge difference on next boot.

Another nice thing to know is that you windows profile is half the time responsible for the lag you're facing on your system, so every once in a while, backup your favourites, save your documents, and delete your profile folder using the admin account of your system. You'll get a new one when you log in to your own account again, and it will be freed from all crappy registry settings you ammased but didnt realy need.

Finaly, the best thing to speed up your computer is installing Linux on it, and get productive. :)

I have to disagree with the posting under #29 point 2. IF you where smart enough to set your page file to twice your memory (but max 1024 MB (bigger is useless)) for the min and max values, then you wont have to worry about fragmentation all that much.

You should also NEVER EVER use your system partition as your working partition for 3rd party apps. This means: Don't let Nero, Pinacle Studio and whatever else uses temporary files, store them on C:. Instead, redirect to D, and if you dont have a D, repartition your drive on the first occasion that lends itself to it, and make a D partition. The idear is that you ONLY install Windows, Office, other apps you are not going to uninstall on C, and your games on D. Then make sure all other apps use D for temporary storage and your defragmentation days are over.

True, this means you have to do some work, and that kinda validates the original post, but in the end it's missuse that defragments the drive, and Windows get's intalled default in 'max abuse mode' to your computer. This is because it also requires the least effort from the user.

That sharpens his last point: With google you have no excuse no more not to know the bare basics of your OS. Not knowing the bare basics is like not knowing anything about weapons but how the trigger works, and owning one. It's dangerous.

Another implication of adding and deleting the software is HDD fragmentation, which is a highly neglected cause of Windows slowing down. Most people tend to take it casually, but fragmentation can build up to cause stability issues like crashes and even boot problems.

Cool that someone actually took their time testing this, even though most results weren't very surprising (I've always known installing Norton is about the worst thing you can do unless you liked the days when you could go and make a cup of coffee while waiting for your computer to boot up). What's really bothering me about windows, though, is how it seems to get slower just by being installed on a system. I mean no web surfing with Internet Explorer, no installing suspicious software or very much software at all. Just the basics; office or OpenOffice, one chat client and so on. I mean why? How can anyone expect people to run an operating system/applications suite that actually decays over time? To me it's absurd. I mean, I have tons of software installed/uninstalled/reinstalled on my linux system, and I've been using it for years without any measurable slowdown. Compare to my friends' windows systems that start crashing and/or getting painfully slow after a couple of months.

CCleaner is also very nice, but I'm not sure about how it affected the boot times
Please test CA Anti-Virus 2007 v8.4!