networkworld.com — The reasons people give as to why their computer sucks, such as "It’s too slow, I need a faster one, etc." may be fixable using a reputable PC tune-up program on their existing system, rather than going out to get a brand-new system. Here are several reasons why computers end up slowing down or "suck" from the purchase date to about 2 years later.
Feb 9, 2010 View in Crawl 4
lostatollFeb 10, 2010
I just installed mac os x on my peecee.. thank god.
theghostofmeFeb 10, 2010
Easier to backup? I'm pretty sure hitting File > Export in regedit is about as easy as it comes.
darkreddragonFeb 10, 2010
This article actually does partially relate to a mac as well. For instance when the guy says " Fragmentation: Like the issues with the registry, the constant installation and uninstallation of programs can cause havoc on the PC?s hard drive." well Mac and PC have the same file structure now, thats why they can both live on the same hard drive now. Also when he says " Browser tool bars: Tool bars and extensions to browsers also can chip away at a PC?s available memory or processing power" well the same can be said for mac no? I thought firefox and chrome were both made for Mac and Windows right? Also the author says that viruses are a problem for PC's, however he doesn't even go into the time that Mac was hacked about thirty minutes after claiming to be unhackable. Oh and one last thing, wasn't the blue screen of death removed in XP? Oh well just thought I'd question these things maybe I'm wrong.
stupidfiltersFeb 10, 2010
sigh... this is a terrible article, and only complains about user errors not the OS itself.1. you're not uninstalling correctly if you're leaving things in the registry2. stop installing s**t that has bloat3. fix your hardware/drivers, and that bsod won't showup4. you can disable those startup programs pretty easily5. STOP INSTALLING RANDOM s**t6. not sure, haven't encountered anything of the sort, and i haven't rebooted for about a month. sounds like user installing bloatware7. fragmentation isn't just a windows thing, it happens on all disk storage. manage your files better, use a 2nd hdd as a swap partition8. STOP INSTALLING RANDOM s**t9. STOP INSTALLING s**t YOU DON"T KNOW. And keep your computer updated10. internet speed? really? not a windows problem unless you're talking about the 60 sec wireless scan that causes a slight latency spike (vista, not sure about win7 and it can be fixed with a small workaround). Bandwidth is determined elsewhere.all of this is user incompetence not the OS
michaelsafyanFeb 11, 2010
Rather than buy a whole bunch of stuff to "tune" your PC, why not simply install Ubuntu? Also, defragmenting your Windows computer won't change the fact that it's ... well ... Windows. The UNIX system architecture (found in Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and pretty much all non-Windows machines) is simply more well-thought out and robust, not to mention more well-standardized, than the various flavors and editions of Microsoft Windows. In addition, there is much more free, open source software that can run on UNIX than can run on Windows, so Windows users often have to pay for things that Linux and Mac users get for free.
michaelsafyanFeb 11, 2010
Users should never have to manually remove things from the registry; it is a serious flaw in the uninstaller program or in the uninstaller's user interface if it neglects to remove traces of the program it is to remove.It is also unreasonable for end users (or anyone other than a driver developer) to be able to know, beforehand, whether a driver will work well or not. In a well-designed system, the OS will protect itself and other applications from the effects of a driver malfunction and will automatically uninstall drivers that consistently fail. A driver crash should never be able to bring down the system. Part of the problem with Windows has been that it grants more privileges to drivers than they deserve, allowing poorly written driver software to crash the entire kernel.While fragmentation does occur in other filesystems, most OSs do a better job of automatically reclaiming storage behind the scenes. Windows is fairly infamous for requiring this process to be manually performed and for doing it in a way that interferes with other operations on the system.
michaelsafyanFeb 11, 2010
There actually are articles for tuning the Mac. Probably the simplest thing to do is to download and install "OnyX", which allows you to manually execute the various system maintanence tasks, such as cleaning font caches, rebuilding the Spotlight index, deleting temporary files, deleting Internet caches, prebinding library symbols (only applies to older versions of OS X), "unique-ing" library selectors (similar to prebinding, but applies to newer versions of OS X), etc. However, manually running the system maintanence tasks really isn't necessary; Mac OS X uses the "launchd" program to periodically execute these tasks on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
michaelsafyanFeb 11, 2010
So the problem with the registry is that all the applications store information in a single location. That allows that one location to become incredibly bloated and slow. On Mac OS X, each application gets its own "property list" (PLIST) file that contains its preference information. Because each application gets its own separate file for storing user preference data, the size of that preference file tends to be small, which, in turn, makes reading and writing to that file really, really fast. Also, it allows users to easily delete preference data on a per-application basis (these preference files may be found in ~/Library/Preferences/ and are named according to the application's ID, which is usually the domain-name in reverse for that application).