I'll admit I generally try to be an unbiased person. I'll also admit that that is a blatant lie. I'll be honest, I am a linux guy. It's what I use every day, for just about everything. And if I need windows, hey! Virtualbox! And if I need OSX I'm doing something wrong (seriously, it's a BSD distro that needs to go for a run... 6 GB? Come on! Windows 7 is 3.2 GB.... way to go Stevie... do you wash that turtleneck? Like, ever?). I digress. Anyhow, like a lot of my blog entries, there is a story behind this one and thus a reason I am writing about it in the first place. My girlfriend and I absolutely hate eachother's computers. She uses Windows Vista, I use Arch Linux. I say her's is slow, she says mine is too texty, etc etc. Anyway, we were arguing about it a little, and it ended with the decision that since I was a computer engineer, I should be the one to 'fix' her computer. So, I sat down, and stated fixing it.

I'm going to give some guidelines on how to speed things up, and what order things should be done in. The first thing that should be done, is that you should download CCleaner (available free on the internet) and run both the cleaner and registry fixer. This will remove megabytes if not gigabytes of temporary files and useless registry entries from your computer. My word of advice is to allow CCleaner to save a registry file to your computer incase something does go wrong. I performed this step without a hitch, and freed up... wait for it... over 11 GB of space on the girlfriends computer. 11. GB. That's between 15 and 20 full length movies.

Now, open up your control panel (start->control panel for those who haven't used a computer before) and click the one that says something along the lines of "Uninstall Programs" or "Add and Remove Programs"... the keyword is programs. Now, you are to look at every entry in that list, and decide what it is, and whether or not it is important. *disclaimer* if you delete a driver or something to that end, I claim NO responsibility. I'm sorry you either can't read or don't know the difference between something that says "bluetooth driver" in it and something that says "aol toolbar"... This will free up a fair bit of space if you manage to take enough off. To be on the safe side, if you don't know what something is, don't touch it, it could be important (like MSXML... this is important.)

Right. So now what? Well, let's start up a virus scan. If you don't have anti-virus, you can skip this step, or, go download Microsoft Security Essentials off the internet and let it do it's thing. While this is happening, go ahead and run the ccleaner stuff again, to weed out any unneeded files and registry entries. You really should run these things once a week to keep your computer healthy and clean. While the virus scan is going, take a look at your task bar. Check out the icons, and make sure you know what each one does. If there is something on there you never use, and you know what it does, go ahead and get rid of it. Furthermore, right click on it and see if there is a settings dialog, and see if you can turn off it's automatic startup function. There is no need for skype, MSN, AIM, and the like to start when your computer starts. No need. Ever.

Once the virus scan is done, start a disk defragmentation. This is something else that should be done once a week. NTFS is horrible. When you delete data from an NT filesystem, you are basically creating holes of information on your hard drive, that the needle needs to get over to get to the rest of your data. Longer distances means longer loading times equals people wondering why their computer is running so slow. Defragmentation takes the fragments of files and pushes it all together, making things faster again. This part takes a while. I'm still waiting for it to finish. It's been 30 minutes. Only do this once a week. You'll drive yourself nuts.

After defragmentation, restart your computer, and continue normal use. You should see some speed improvements, and if you can keep cleaning your computer like this, it will stay fast.

To sumarize for you:

ccleaner
remove programs
ccleaner
virus scan
defragmentation
restart

Hopefully you see an improvement. And hey, if you don't, there's always linux... (come to the dark side... we have tshirts...)

Peace,
~Bodom