Windows XP forum: Poll: What do you do first when your Windows system slows down significantly?

The first thing I do is to restart my system; I leave mine on 24/7 and this usually does the trick...to restart it to get out the cobwebs...
If it continues to run slow I will look into other areas but that rarely happens with my system.

Windows are always improving because they have so many drawbacks from windows v3 to windows v8 they remove some drawbacks but include new drawbacks.

Windows XP and vista on start up registry system gets so much complicated with time that windows searching itself for system files for half an hours in 2-3 years, also depend on usage.

For better results windows should be reinstalled in one year.

This is all based on only experiences.

Hi All
I have had 4 PC's over the years. And it seems they all slowed down in about a year of use. And I did all the house cleaning, defrag, clean up ect.
What I did after awhile is fork out a couple of hundred for a Windows CD and once a year I would wipe the hard drive clean and reinstall windows. This cleaned out any viruses that got through and all the cludder from the viruse updates. And my speed was back to normal.
I hate slow computers.
So when I got a few extra bucks I bought an iMac.I have had it for seven years now and have not noticed any slow down. Or viruses. There is no need to defrag and do that clean up stuff. It takes care of that stuff on it's own.

But no one could sell me an adapter to hook to my HD big screen tv.So I got another used PC fron a computer store.
Right away I noticed the slower speed and wasn't happy with the picture it gave me. It didn't have a HD output.
So on to ebay and I found a mini dvi to HDMI adapter for 20 bucks for the Mac. Wow what a picture it gave me.

My iMac came with 1 GB of ram and I wanted to drop a whole $19.95 for the new Mountain Lion OS. But it needs 2 GB of ram to operate. So I installed 4 GB and now going on line is almost instant. Can you tell I am a apple fan. No more slow PC's for me.
This is the only whey I now of keeping a computer up to speed with out all the hassle.

My notebook is used in a room which gets nice and warm (30-35C/ about 90F) in summer, and slows down considerably when hot. Steps to rule out various other causes are:

1/ Shut down, wait a minute, start up. Is any software auto-updating? Is a scheduled scan in progress?

2/ run ProcExp - Process Explorer by Sysinternals (now part of Microsoft) to see whether any process is taking a large percentage of CPU capacity; then open the System Information window to get a quick view of System Commit and Physical memory usage, I/O, Network and Disk activity. In ProcExp, hovering over the process name reveals which services are involved, and in the case of Internet Explorer which open tabs use most CPU.

3/ run Speccy - by Piriform, to check on temperatures of CPU, disk and Mobo.
On the RAM page you will find green indicator squares which show at a glance how much memory is free; the CPU page will show core speed and multiplier - is anything maxing things out?; the Network page shows your link speed - is there any internet traffic at all?

4/ run CCleaner : Tools tab to view and disable Startup items; Registry tab to scan for issues; Cleaner to analyze and remove unnecessary bits.

5/ run either Disk defragmenter or Defraggler by Piriform - on XP and Vista I found that it significantly reduced the amount of disk space in use, and reduced loading time; less so on 7, but still worth a look.

6/ even though you may have plenty of physical RAM, Windows will place some content in the swapfile/ System Commit : as I type, 45% of physical memory is in use, and yet a greater amount resides in the System Commit on the hard disk.

As an aside: found that once a hard disk is approx. 2/3 full Windows starts to compress files; both compressing and decompressing take clock cycles and therefore slows things down. Therefore consider
a/ uninstalling all programs which are no longer used (on each update, previous versions are stored on the hard disk, this space is released when the program is uninstalled), and
b/ move archivable files to an external disk/ thumbdrive (again, previous copies of edited files are kept by the OS, and the photo editing software also keeps go-back copies - hence adjusting a photo increases the amount of storage needed threefold, all of which is released once the file is moved off the computer).

And finally, if the computer remains slow : externally store all files you want to keep, de-activate and uninstall all software, then do a clean install; it takes time, but on a Win7 netbook it sped things up considerably. Whether you'll recoup that time by shorter waiting times? Perhaps, perhaps not, but once you're annoyed enough ... .

From my experience, if you backup everything on a regular basis, and are careful in what you download or install, you don't have to worry about a lot of this. Because I'm still honestly using an eight year old computer with the same Windows installation, and it runs just fine.

I keep an image of my system and settings partitions no less than every month, and when I even suspect something is happening, I tend to restore a recent backup and it tends to solve any problem quickly and safely.

If people would do things a little more responsibly, from my experience, they don't have to worry about things slowing down after time.

OMG I am just about ready to buy a PC and then I see this. Rarely does my MacBook slow down significantly. If it does, I run a single program to clean it up and go about my work. This poll and answers reminds me how much time I spent over the years doing most of those items in the poll when something happened. I thought maybe the PC had evolved, but maybe not. Add to that, there are so many viruses etc being released to attack PCs that it is no wonder there are problems. I will think about the new PC a little more. True it is less costly and there is software that I cannot run on the Mac, but now I question my decision to buy another PC.

I can't find a virus for that OS (Mac OS X) and let's be clear what a virus is. Malware can be put on any platform that allows folk to craft code and is open for you to load that app.

Are you suggesting that you are ready for a closed computer with the hood welded shut and no one can write apps for it unless they work for the maker? Example? Xbox, PS3.
Bob