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The 15 minute Windows XP tune-up

tweak3d.net — Computing siteTweak3D.net offers a few suggestions that can get that sluggish machine running at max speed in fifteen minutes or less...

Who dugg this? Made popular Aug 8, 2006

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139 Comments

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  • blablaman, on 10/12/2007, -21/+854 step guide:

    1) Visit apple.com/store
    2) Cry in agony
    3) Sell kidney
    4) Become fanboy
  • haooken, on 10/12/2007, -5/+62http://www.tomasbecklin.com/hello/2/894/1024/iProduct.jpg
  • slowspin, on 10/12/2007, -4/+45Hm, your forward-slash should be a backslash. It says Invalid Switch - "Windows". Maybe I should try it with my backslash instead. OK, good, this time it sa....
  • BlackToothX, on 10/12/2007, -5/+35Nice - detailed and simple to understand
    plus my system definately needed this :)
    +digg
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -16/+41What the ***** is it with you linux fanboys.
    You guys are almost as bad as the mac lovers with your irrelevant postings about how your linux lovechilds will solve all world problems.
    Just ***** off and leave your linux crap for stories that (wait for it) ACTUALLY HAVE SOMETHING TO DO WITH LINUX in them!!
    If people wanted to run linux, they probably allready are. Posting your vomit in a windows story so you can feel superiour with your small penises and OS that can't run ***** (ie, comercial mainstream apps) just makes you look like a bunch of *****!
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -5/+30@rasterbator
    You'll need a better comment than that to avoid getting buried.

    This isn't Slashdot. You aren't going to get modded as "funny" for jumping on the MS Hate Wagon just because it's the cool thing to do.
  • bdgraaron, on 10/12/2007, -5/+30zybch - Why does the MS defrag utility suck? PerfectDisk and Diskeeper both cost money. If you ask me, THAT sucks.
  • BransonLAN, on 10/12/2007, -5/+29Defragmentation isn't needed daily, IMHO. If using BitTorrent a lot, or add and delete stuff often, then there is a little more of a need, but not generally.
  • slowspin, on 10/12/2007, -3/+27Probably not too bad an idea to avoid typing.
  • johnnybravoh, on 10/12/2007, -3/+22How in the hell is Windows not appropriate for Photoshop or graphics? I don't do any video editing so I can't speak to that, but Windows is an absolutely fine platform for Photoshop and/or graphics.

    Gimme a break.
  • jcjdoss, on 10/12/2007, -6/+24Very well written. Even my non techie mom could understand it. Keep it up.
  • aaronzott, on 10/12/2007, -5/+23Defragging your hard drive with Windows XP is not nearly as necessary as everyone seems to think these days (on a home box). You need to be moving lots of things around all the time to make it even close to being necessary.
  • Tingler, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13Start > run > cmd

    at 4:00 /every:m,t,w,th,f,sa,su defrag c:

    Done. Your machine will automagically defrag every morning @ 4am

  • FRAGaLOT, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14cuz 870 people clicked the digg button. Duh.
  • Jangles, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15You are the first, and hopefully the last person I have seen to suggest a daily defrag, lol.
  • DavidandDenise, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12I know it doesn't apply to everyone, but my #1 piece of advice for the average user is to get rid of Norton Antivirus / Internet Security. I've never seen a single piece of software slow down a computer like that bloated package does.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -5/+17minus searching for comperable programs to do what I need, minus trying to get my sound to work, minus trying to get my wireless to work, minus migrating my data there, minus buying different hardware to support the "free" OS.

    good bye.
  • anjinash, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13If I wanted to be preached to, I'd be at church instead of on Digg. Seriously, you Mac trolls need to pass around the peace pipe a bit and ***** relax. I like Macs, but they're too ***** expensive for a machine that has limited ability to upgrade. I use Photoshop on a daily basis and edit video (Premiere) and sound (Audition) on a semi-regular basis on a P4 with 2GB of RAM and I have NO problems with it. When I'm feeling particularly geeky I reboot into Ubuntu or whatever Linux I'm fooling around with at the moment.

    With the economy as it is, gas/oil prices rising every day, the the middle class slowly disappearing ... most of us can't afford Apple's overpriced (and over hyped) hardware. Release OSX for all x86 machines and watch me switch, until then shut the ***** up.
  • johnnybravoh, on 10/12/2007, -8/+19@zbch: I totally agree. I think that some people post ***** like this just because they want to appear cool and cutting edge. It doesn't matter. Linux is not ready for the desktop. Sorry. You can argue with me all day long, but it simply isn't. It's a wonderful platform for the server and one that I wholeheartedly support and depend on but Windows is faaar better on the desktop than any flavor of Linux.
  • blablaman, on 10/12/2007, -4/+15Can we make the spell checker mandatory?
  • mybrainhurts, on 10/12/2007, -3/+14Graphics,Photoshop,video. Wow, I must have been imagining all the work I've done on my highly inferior XP box over the last 4 years. Where is The Almighty Steve Jobs to swoop down and save me from myself.

    Dear Mactard,
    Go fall off a cliff into a fiery well and take your Apple marketing ***** with you.
  • superheroboy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12I use CCleaner every time I visit my parent's place and it speeds up their machine immensely.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -6/+16I must be a geek, I did not learn anything new. *sigh*
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -5/+14@redxii
    People who are finding this article useful probably wouldnt be able to figure out what to do after the ubuntu install. Try to explain to grandma how to install ndiswrapper. Or better yet, just have her enable the universe and multiverse repositories.

    I think you missed the target demographic of the article completely with that statement.
  • Lososaurus, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11@blablaman:
    6 step guide:

    1) Visit apple.com/store
    2) Decide to try apple
    3) Sell kidney
    4) Sell arm
    5) Sell leg
    6) Wonder why the hell you bought an apple.

    Fixed.
  • mybrainhurts, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10"is digg a technological news site for newbies?"

    Well, it has become a fansite for mac kids...
  • Namco, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9Actually, I think he's only a captain.
  • pyrotherm, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9Just FYI, if you use Azureus for your BT client and use the "Allocate and zero files upon creation" option, you will have a 0% fragmentation rate on your downloaded files, providing you have enough contiguous free space on the drive.
  • webcrumb, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7I tinhk he kliled the selpl cechker...
  • shakeyshakey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I use TuneUp too is pretty good and you can find a serial anywhere (*cough*crackspider.net*cough*). I also use norton utilities wich has a really neat defrag app, but now i use Disk Keeper.
    Anyway, good article, will be handy for those who are not really tech savy, but i think most of the more geeky users already knew/done most of this tips.
  • selgan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Another good tip is to make sure your hard drive is NTFS. Some OEMs ship your system with the OS on a FAT32 partition. You can also have a FAT32 partition by upgrading from 98 or an earlier version of Windows. To convert your partition/hdd to NTFS just go to the command prompt at type:

    convert [drive letter] /fs:ntfs
    Press 'n' (You DON'T want to force a dismount)
    Then press 'y' to allow the conversion to take place at the next reboot.
  • natterca, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Actually I believe font smoothing behaves differently on flat panel displays, and it DOES improve small type. The reason is FP's have 3 physical pixels (R,G,B) for each colour "pixel"; the smoothing adjusts the colours (slightly) so that in effect, you are tripling the resolution of the panel.
  • ilselu1, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7Nice writeup, simple and step by step.
  • ScrappyLaptop, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3contig and pgdefrag from sysinternals (Now, with Microsoft Goodness built right in!) are free and do a great job. I set pgdefrag to run at boot and contig to run nightly. On a lightly fragged system w/80GB drive it only takes a couple of minutes to complete. On days when it is heavily fragmented it is still quite a bit faster than the built in MS util, about par with the commercial diskkeeper.

    Interesting that the guide instructs people to go to various places to adjust things that start up at boot (services, 'run' reg entries, startup menu shortcuts) when they can all be controlled from msconfig. Then it would only be the 10 minute guide....
  • jasnmb, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6Hitting the Analyze button first will tell you if defragging is necessary or not.
  • cmiz, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5I've currently got 1.5 gigs of ram in my laptop and have found it to be overkill. Is there anyone out there who doesn't do intensive video editing, 3d rendering or something like that who has actually made use of more than 2 gigs? I had a girl tell me that 4 gigs of ram was a must, I laughed and patted her on the head... sure it is.

    Here's my guide to keeping your computer running smoothly:
    1) Don't let anyone else use it.
    2) Seriously, just don't let anyone else use it...
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6This tutorial isn't for the advanced user. These are all tweaks that I always use, myself. But it's well-written for somebody who doesn't know a lot about computers. Dugg.
  • ascott9, on 10/12/2007, -9/+12agreed, I was hoping for something new. You would think most digg users would know most of these things.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7Defrag or not, when you do, just DON'T use MS's own defrag utility that comes with windows, it really sucks!
    Disk keeper is okay, but I prefer Perfect Disk a lot more, esp its offline (boot time) defrag of system files and the pagefile which windows won't usually allow you to touch.
  • dolanman, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5i'd reccommend just downloading a copy of TuneUp Utilities 2006. it'll do all of this and much more with just a few clicks in the different program categories. it sped up my comp considerably.

    dolan
  • SuperFarStucker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Mark Russinovich who is widely regarded as the most knowledgeable man in the world when it comes to Windows internals seems to think cleaning the registry hives is a patently bad idea. Not only is a difficult thing to do properly, the benefits are questionable/negligible at best, and a misstep can be costly.

    The best thing you can do to keep your PC in serviceable condition is keep bloatware/malware off. It IS that simple. 1 GiB of memory is more than enough for your average desktop user/power user (hint: if you read this article hoping to find something 'new' you fall into this category). 2 GiB is necessary for certain games at 'high quality' settings and can help when you're doing heavy lifting (real work on high resolution PSD files in photoshop, etc.)
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Diskeeper? Pfftt... Use Contig from Sysinternals. Put contig.exe in C:, and run contig C:*.* -q -s as a recurring scheduled task.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -4/+6Well I don't have cancer, but I sure don't go round trying to get everyone infected by it.
  • evilseth, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3nothing new to me but good article.

    forgot to metion it's a good idea to run chkdsk /f before defrag

    +digg
  • doolittle, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Suprised noone mentioned these, so here goes...

    UBCD - an excellent off-line diagnostic tool, mem / cpu / hdd tests all excellent to isolate windows / hardware problems
    http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html

    Autopatcher - a complete security patch / tweak rollup - perfect to bring a fresh install of sp2+ up-to-date *prior* to connecting the network cable. Also great if you don't trust MS any more to auto-update, monthly updates not long after patch tuesday.
    http://www.autopatcher.com/
  • kalman5150, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Wow! How many times have I seen the same article paraphrased over and over and over again????????? Every other goddamn pc magazine has this same ***** article every month!!!!
  • steal_apps01, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Crap Cleaner works really well (just google it) It runs on all my windows machine 98 to xp that i've tried it on. Even works on my old Compaq with 16Mb of Ram and a 350MHz Celeron w/ Windows XP, speeds everything up.
  • steger, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2well diskeeper has an auto scheduling feature that will run whenever you set it. be it daily, weekly... whatever. so buy haveing it run daily, i can expect basically no harddrive issues at all. Plus i can't even tell that it's running when it is because it has technolgy to only run when the disk isn't being used by any other program. You can use the built-in defrag (btw is a lite and much slower version of diskeeper). if you guys think that if you just listen to mp3s, surf the web, and do basic stuff that you don't need to defrag, you are missing the point.
  • luckyjonny, on 10/12/2007, -4/+5@blablaman

    then:

    1) Repair disk permissions
    2) Run cron scripts
    3) Delete corrupted preferences
    4) Zap the PRAM
  • anudeglory, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3I still laugh at people with this odd obsessive compulsive disorder for defragmenting their hard drives...though it's bad form to laugh at people with mental issues.

    Once a month is obsessive for a normal user, once a day is just ludicrous and a fast track to killing your drive prematurely (not to mention the immense waste of time, resources and electricity).

    When we had small hard drives, I guess anything less than 20Gb (the days of Win95 etc), then there was a real need to defragment files (as there was little contiguous free space) but now that we have 20Gb plus (and most new systems coming with ~80GB minimum and a lot of people running 80GB+++) the expanse of contiguous space on these drives is so vast that files will rarely be fragmented - as the space exists to write them in their entirety.

    Once every six months (for normal users) should be enough to keep the disk running nicely and help extend it's life rather than end it early. Fair enough if you are running image/video/sound editing software or downloading movie/music constantly - then you will need to do it more often but generally err on the side of less is more. :)
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