OT: Degunking my Windows XP

overyonder wrote on 7/27/2008, 9:48 AM

My system is getting real slow in general - applications taking forever to open and close, minor weird behaviours, etc. Vegas8 also slower than usual...

Anyone have ideas on how to spruce things up without a total fresh reinstall of everything? I don't have the time or desire to go thorough all that.

I scan for Virus & spyware regularly, Defrag, occasional registry cleaner...

System is P4 3.0g, 1g memory

Thanks for any tips,

John

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johnmeyer wrote on 8/13/2008, 10:18 AM

REGISTRY CLEANERS: I've found them to do more harm than good. I've seen them hose computers but I've never seen them fix a computer.I agree 100%. Stay away from these. They try to fix a "problem" that doesn't need fixing.

Jeff9329 wrote on 8/13/2008, 10:43 AM

Coursedesign:

I understand. I think the Storage Review comparisons would give someone a better apples to apples comparison since all drives are compared using 4k blocks/clusters using 8 sectors, which is standard. However, I don't think translating cluster size performance changes between HD models would be accurate, you would need actual testing (which you did).

What cluster size are you running on your storage drives partition?

The bummer about larger clusters is the space utilization. I just had to make a decision on a new storage drive this morning and stuck with 4K after using the WD algorithm which estimated too much lost storage.

Coursedesign wrote on 8/13/2008, 12:01 PM

I use 4K blocks, single partition for media drives.

Note also that the WD 640 GB drive is much quieter and cooler than the 10K drives, another nice benefit in addition to not causing too much weight loss in your wallet :O).