Speed up pc ?

[souperman]

Computer seems very slow nowadays, on investigation found 34 out of 37GB on c drive (boot) was used...however on the backup drive d I have only 1 out of 34GB used, what if anything should/could I shift to backup drive and once done would this improve performance by much ? Is this even an option ?
I would say that most of the used memory on the c drive is taken up with music, photos, kids games, etc etc etc.
Running xp, P 4, 2.5Ghz, 512 ram.
Any help gratefully received.

[maidencaithness]

Computer seems very slow nowadays, on investigation found 34 out of 37GB on c drive (boot) was used...however on the backup drive d I have only 1 out of 34GB used, what if anything should/could I shift to backup drive and once done would this improve performance by much ? Is this even an option ?
I would say that most of the used memory on the c drive is taken up with music, photos, kids games, etc etc etc.
Running xp, P 4, 2.5Ghz, 512 ram.
Any help gratefully received.

Loads you can do firstly would clean up c drive using the windows tool also remove anything you no longer use. (when installing games you should defrag before and after installation because games fire the files all over the hard drive) then defrag to see if that makes a difference.

Your media files would be better on d drive. Next you can check the "commit charge" on the task manager (lower right hand corner) guidelines state that if amount in use (left figure) is more than 50% of total figure (right hand) you need more RAM.

You can also check which progs run on startup as normally are plenty you don't need access too on regular basis. There is an excellent free prog called startup.exe (use google to find) which lets you control which progs load at startup.

Of course spyware is another problem which can slow pc if you don't have then go onto www.majorgeeks.com and you'll find good freeware there.

[souperman]

Thanks very much for your help, I`ll give it a try.

[Jeemag_USA]

Also try adaware from lavasoft.com to remove spyware.

9 times out of 10 when people complina of slow PC's its because they have way too much stuff in their start up process. If you download a lot of stuff from the internet like software and stuff, often when you install applications they set themselves in your startup so when you start you PC you could have a multitude of things trying to start at once, a lot of applications like filesharing programs and so on have realtime updating so they are constantly running in the background. Too much stuff running at once is what slows down your PC. You can have a 100GB hard drive and use 99.99999% of it and it won't make no difference to your PC speed.

I normally only have max three things in my startup process and they are usually necessary stuff for running windows. Everything else I install on my PC i make it so it only opens when I want it to.

I'd look for a program called RegCleaner, its real easy to use and you can access your startup file instantly and remove everything you don't need on startup.

[pedromcgrory]

hit start run then type in msconfig.exe then looks wots starting up ul find like stated u dont need most of em,i untick all of them

[souperman]

Thanks for all replies, much appreciate your time.

[RIR]

You could also try this: http://www.ccleaner.com/


Cheers

Ian.

[Dog-eared]

Or try Ashampoo WinOptimizer
It cleaned things up for me, now much faster.

[Colin Manson]

Computer seems very slow nowadays, on investigation found 34 out of 37GB on c drive (boot) was used...however on the backup drive d I have only 1 out of 34GB used, what if anything should/could I shift to backup drive and once done would this improve performance by much ? Is this even an option ?
I would say that most of the used memory on the c drive is taken up with music, photos, kids games, etc etc etc.
Running xp, P 4, 2.5Ghz, 512 ram.
Any help gratefully received.

Move all the stuff that you want to keep to the D Drive, reinstall xp on the C Drive doing a quick format in the process to wipe the drive.

Fixes and reg tweaks will help a little but there is nothing like a fresh install for improving the speed.