Whats wrong with my computer :(

[Poxican]

It used to run braw. It's a couple years old now, but when I got it about a year ago it ran really nicely.

It boots up quick enough, but then it takes a while to sign in (running XP) and then applications take ages to start up! Firefox takes almost a minute, whereas months ago it was fine.

I did a full virus scan, windows disk cleanup and defrag, but it's no better. I used to be quite clued up about PC's but I was without one for a couple years and now I don't know what to do.

Any suggestions?

[funkyfraz]

a reinstall will sort it. You should have had restore disks. I do mine every so often, and everything in my 2nd partition gets kept, so I don't lose out on photo's and music and porn.

[Poxican]

Should I format the thing, or just reinstall windows?

[holnrew]

Go through your startup programs and de-select all the unecessary ones by searching for the process in google.

[digitalscream]

Are you comfortable with the registry editor? The places you want to look for pointless processes are:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Run\
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Run\

Your best bet is to boot into safe mode, launch regedit (Start > Run > type "regedit" and click "run") then go to the above locations. In them, you'll find a list of programs which launch on login. Common culprits for slow login times are anything by Adobe (eg Acrobat), Quicktime, your printer manager (usually pointless graphical eye candy and not required for actually printing - HP and Epson are the worst for this), Quicktime and your scanner software.

Whatever you do, do *not* delete the entries for your antivirus (unless it's Norton or McAfee, at which point you should uninstall the lot and get Avast or AVG free editions - that's just my bias, but Norton and McAfee do slow login down a fair bit). You may find other stuff in there that you think it's safe to delete. If you don't recognise something, look at the .exe file it runs and Google it - you'll find out whether it's safe to delete or not.

As well as this, you should go through your Add/Remove Programs list and get rid of absolutely everything that's not necessary, then click Start > All Programs > Startup and see if there's anything in there you don't want (just right-click the entry and delete it).

[Axe_meister]

Then defrag your disk

[digitalscream]

Originally Posted by Axe_meister

Then defrag your disk

This really doesn't make that much difference any more - with older, slower disks and less efficient filesystems, it was really a problem, but nowadays with the extremely low latency and high transfer rates (not to mention the huge cache sizes on hard drives), the problem of fragmentation is pretty much a negligible issue except in extreme cases.

[Axe_meister]

It can help alot if you are low on memory and the OS needs to swap. Defragging will give you a nice piece of contiguous space for a nice fixed size swap file.
Also any large files you may use (movies) are much better off as one large file rather than scattered across the platter

[digitalscream]

Originally Posted by Axe_meister

It can help alot if you are low on memory and the OS needs to swap. Defragging will give you a nice piece of contiguous space for a nice fixed size swap file.
Also any large files you may use (movies) are much better off as one large file rather than scattered across the platter

Exactly, but every OS since XP SP1 reserves the first xGB of the drive for the swap file, so it only gets fragmented if it needs to grow a lot - and the OS is relatively intelligent in that it picks areas with lots of contiguous space to grow the swap file into.

Fragmentation is an absolute given for large files on a drive which is used for write as well as read operations, but it's hardly going to make a difference. a 700MB video file in 200 parts is still 3.5MB of average continuous reading, which is easily enough to maintain high read performance (eg copy a couple of hundred mp3 files, and you'll see performance roughly equal to the maximum performance of your drive - and that's with the additional overhead of a boatload of file metadata per "fragment").

The problem of fragmentation only really gets worse when you're really running out of disk space (~1% of space left on the drive). I've seen drives which were 30% fragmented, done a full defrag to try to speed it up and the boot/launch times have only improved by less than 5%.

[ianpdq]

Try a regcleaner it works for me http://download.cnet.com/1770-20_4-0...form%3DWindows