I didn't want to mirror image or clone my old drive. That would have saved whatever was messing things up. Yeah it's a real pain to start over, and I still have days/weeks ahead of me to finish the transition, but seeing the performance improvement I'm getting from having gotten rid of the junk makes it seem well worth it.

I didn't want to mirror image or clone my old drive.

Yes, I understand that, BUT as soon as you get all your applications installed and working to your liking THEN (today or tomorrow) you should create a mirror image.

In addition, I strongly recommend that you partition your disk into a C: and D: drive (perhaps you already do this). Put your O/S and programs on C:. Use Microsoft's "TweakUI" tool to change your "MyDocuments" and other folders to some location on your D: drive. Put everything else you possibly can on the D: drive (I put my main paging file there, although based on various recommendations, I leave a trivial 16 MByte page file on C:). By doing this, you can create a very small (4-5 GByte) image file that will fit on one DVD and which can easily and quickly be restored if you want to "go back." In addition, because this image is small and easily re-created, you can create new ones in just a matter of a few minutes. Do this every week, and put these either on external drives or DVD. Then, when bad things happen, or you just can't get the performance you used to get, you have many alternatives for how far back in time you want to go.

Finally, FWIW, I spend a LOT of time working on other people's computers, trying to get them fast again, without resorting to FDISK/FORMAT/REINSTALL. A VERY large percentage of the slowness comes from the following:

1. Norton Anti-Virus. One of the most evil programs ever created. If you use it, your computer will run slow. Period. Get rid of it.

2. Indexing. Turn it off.

3. Bad printer drivers. HP Printer drivers, especially for their multifunction units, can cause amazingly bad things to happen. This includes long boot times, strange error messages, and pop-ups.

4. Start-up "bloat." Use MSCONFIG to turn off all the stupid stuff that many programs insist on loading and running in the background. They are seldom needed and are usually doing things in the background, such as looking for updates, "cleaning up," or simply helping you launch the application a little faster.

5. DMA. I have run into many, many computers that had DMA disabled. Many years ago, computer companies would ship systems this way in order to avoid incompatibility problems (although I don't really know what they were trying to avoid). In the past few years, however, I have seen this on computers that have had some sort of problems along the way (for example, not being able to boot normally, perhaps because of some misbehaving peripheral). What happens is that XP has code built-in that disables DMA after more than 2-3 such problems occur as a way of "trouble-shooting" the problem. Once disabled, DMA will not be re-enabled unless you do it yourself.

On my main computer, I have been running the same installation of XP for three and a half years, and this computer runs as fast as it ever did. Same with the other nine computers at my home (a few have Windows 95 and 98 installations from ten years ago). I'll admit that anything can happen, so I am not saying that you can't or won't have problems. All I am saying is that when I've found those problems on other people's computers, the above steps fixed things most of the time (once in a blue moon I do actually find a spy-ware or virus infection on other people's computers, but rarely).

Laurence, I was suggesting mirroring your new system after you install your tasks, not your old system.

As John stated, many anti-virus programs are a performance killer, and do not fully remove themselves from the system. Many leave "hooks" in the core system, creating many backdoors if you know where to look.

John's list is great! Follow it. Especially #s 1 and 4.

We have a couple of A/V computers at church that are older, but running Sound Forge, Vegas, and a few other A/V applications very nicely. Then an outside consultant installed Norton antivirus on them one weekend while i was away. Disaster! Sound Forge would only record about 40 minutes then start garbling the signal. Vegas took 3 times as long to render. The projection software we use dropped to about 0.5 fps instead of the 30fps it had been capable of. Program launch times stretched from seconds to minutes. Crashes started happening several times per hour instead of, well, pretty much never. All this from just Norton being installed.

I spent 15 hours cleaning the audio computer to get it running well again. The video computer required a reformat & reinstall to get it functional. The response from the consultant? "Hey, i had those installs locked and password protected. How did you uninstall it?" Ummmmm. maybe because i know more about computers than he does, i guess.

We do have Grisoft AVG installed on both computers and that is good protection with no noticeable problems or slowness.

OK I understand. Yeah, I'll mirror after I get everything running again.

I've been running AVG for years now. Yeah I love it too.

What's indexing and how do you turn it off?

It's no wonder the normal price for Norton is Free After Rebate these days... Even with that, I think they have few takers.

Indexing is in the disk properties. If you need it, Google Desktop works 100x better and never gets in the way.

Google Desktop also indexes Outlook messages so they can be found instantly. To find one or more messages in Outlook 2002 and 2003, enter a search string in Outlook and go to lunch or leave your PC on overnight to find the result in the morning (if you have more than 10 messages in your mailbox).

Outlook 2007 added a "quick indexing feature" so you can find messages even if you don't have to go for a long #2 right then. Unfortunately you have to turn this feature off, because it makes the whole application unresponsive. In the middle of typing text or moving the cursor, the screen freezes for 3-20 seconds while it performs the indexing, before you can see what you're doing again. Better to turn this off and use Google Desktop!

I have two 500 gig drives designated as C and D drives. Should I have further partitioned the C drive so as to have C, D and E drives?

i wouldn't suggest mirroring unless you format frequently (~every 6 months or more). Many many programs update by then & you'll still end up downloading & updating most programs anyway.

You also don't need to go through all that to backup your "my documents". Just burn a DVD of that folder when it's up to size X (whatever size you want to backup up, I do ~4gb to a DVD) then blank it & start all over. need something on the disk copy it back on (or don't delete it).

I've been doing that since '99.

Do you guys recommend AVG free or one of the paid ones? Is the pro one with spyware protection any good? I've been using AVG Free for virus protection and Adaware and Spybot to clean of spyware. I'd love an all in one Virus protector/firewall/spyware protector.

Laurence:

It's probably too late now, but you could have completely rebuilt your OS without a reformat. There was considerable discussion on this board about 6 months ago, so a simple search should turn up some of those threads. I've done this a couple of times over the years, and it works great.

Since I experiment so much with my PC, I'm trashing something every few months, and without a disk image I would be in the deep stuff. I use Acronis TruImage and have it set to do a differential backup every 2 days to a different hard drive in the PC case (not much point in backing up to a different partition of the same drive; if the drive goes, you've lost your backup also). In addition, every 6 months or so I burn that image to DVD and store it offsite, so in a worst-case situation I could be back in business in an hour or so.

Regarding Norton: From what I've read, Norton kept getting bigger and more bloated over the years from the nice efficient Norton 2001 Antivirus program I used for years. Last year I dumped it for NOD32, a very efficient and highly-regarded AV program. The funny thing is that Norton has just introduced an "all-in-one" product called Norton 360, and the reviews are glowing. Reviewers also mention that--surprise!--the new program is much less bloated and far less taxing of computer resources, so maybe it will change people's perceptions of Norton over time.

The other all-in-one I'm tempted to try is the ZoneAlarm Security Suite. The firewall, is, of course, excellent, and now the Suite is running a version of the excellent Kaspersky antivirus engine.

It's good advice johnmayor gives about killing unnecessary start up programs but it can be difficult to know just what to kill. Even utilities that are meant to do this like System Mechanic report nearly everything as necessary! Any guide lines for a mean culling without loosing the system?

Michael

many anti-virus programs are a performance killer, and do not fully remove themselves from the system

Symantec provide a removal tool which is designed to remove the last vestiges of their nightmare that are not deleted by the uninstall program. You can read about it and download it here:

Download and run the Norton Removal Tool


What's indexing and how do you turn it off?

Indexing is a background program built into Windows XP that looks at every word in every data file on your computer and builds a gigantic database that lets you do very fast, complex searches in order to retrieve documents. It is similar to what Google does on the Internet. As already mentioned, Google provides a similar utility which you can download and run for free.

The problem with the Microsoft program is that can "take over" your computer when it decides to run, and it can decide to do that whenever it darn well pleases. If you have a relatively recent release of XP, you can simply right-click on each hard disk drive in Windows Explorer, select Properties, and then un-check "Allow Indexing Service ..." When you click OK, it may take awhile to remove all the files.

You will still be able to search using Find Files, and you can still look for words within files using that feature.

Of course, if you use the advanced indexing search feature, then don't disable it, but it seems like 99.9% of the computer users don't even know this feature exists, and the remaining 0.1% never use it.

Johnmeyer, rootkit hooks that are installed do not get replaced; they substitute a dummy module entry point during the un-install process at best. They do not save the original entry point their replacing in the system core during installation, probably to ensure a product trail plus avoiding hackers accessing re-entry code points around the system hooks. I ran your listed link against a Norton product and the system hooks still remain, but this true for most of anti-virus, anti-hijack software.

Earlier this evening I did a search for antivirus programs on Newegg.com and was amazed to see that the NOD32 product received superlative reviews from Newegg shoppers. This application has kind of a nerdy interface and can be intimidating to the newbie, but I've been very happy with it and it apparently gets very high marks with the professional test labs. I run it along with a ZoneAlarm firewall.

The solution is a dedicated editing computer that only runs the programs that are absolutely necessary for video and photo editing. I would not install an antivirus program that loads at all. I would install a firewall that can be easily disabled and an on-demand virus scanner that can be updated to CHECK for virii occasionally.

When editing I would disconnect from the internet and shut down the firewall. Consider also disabling the network drivers and restarting. Watch how fast it seems when you do that.

I would also try to get rid of any processes that aren't absolutely necessary for XP to function. There are many such lists on the internet. With each new OS come new processes Microsoft deems "necessary" for the OS to function and they quite frankly slow the systems down thereby embroiling most of us in a never ending system "Upgrade Cycle".
Add to that the same notion by other software companies like Apple (Quicktime), and others and you have an albatros instead of a computer. Turn as many processes off as you can get away with. I even shut off the mouseware when I edit.

Although I don't know your configuration, another solution is to get a really fast SMALLER drive for the OS and programs only and use the larger slower drives for video storage and renders.

John

<I>Any guide lines for a mean culling without loosing the system?</I>

Here's the suggestions that Sony put out some time ago.

Close all background applications. This is not limited to the
programs that show in the system tray. Do a ctrl+alt+del and end
task or process on as many applications as you can, leaving only
Explorer and Systray for 98 or ME. For Windows 2000 and XP
move over to the Processes Tab and click the "Image Name"
heading at the top of this window twice, you would be able to view
these items by alphabetical order.

For Windows 2000, you should only have:

explorer.exe
lsass.exe
mapisp32.exe
mstask.exe
services.exe
smss.exe
spoolsv.exe
stisvc.exe
svchost.exe
system
system idle process
taskmgr.exe
winlogon.exe
winmgmt.exe

For Windows XP, you will only need next to your user name:

explorer.exe
taskmgr.exe

Next to "system":
csrss.exe
lsass.exe
mspmspv.exe
services.exe
smss.exe
spoolsv.exe
svchost.exe
system
system idle process
winlogon.exe

Mike

A quick mention for a program called WinPatrol, which can identify programs and services running in the background, and remove or disable them. They have a large database of files to help identify those services or processes that have cryptic names.

I'd also put in a vote for ZoneAlarm, it is by far the easiest application on system resources and one of the most effective.

Other good advice I'd agree with is to run the bare bones applications on your editing PC. Get a hardware firewall (needn't be expensive) from somebody like CISCO and put it between the rest of your network and the Internet, that way you can cut down on yet another application.

The method of reinstalling Windows without deleting data is here:
http://informationweek.com/windows/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=189400897&pgno=1&queryText=

Stuart,

Have you ever tried completely disabling the network hardware interface? That one device seems to really slow a computer down. I remember when I was builing a few computers that didn't have onboard network interfaces. As soon as I installed the network card and it's software the next reboot slowed WAY DOWN.

John

How about this idea: set up at least two user accounts. One is set up however you want for web browsing and general computing. The other is stripped down to basically just running programs like Vegas, DVD Architect, Photoshop, Acid and SoundForge, No network, no Internet, no nothing extra. Would that be a viable way to work given you only have one computer?

John,

>Have you ever tried completely disabling the network hardware interface? That one device seems to really slow a computer down. I remember when I was builing a few computers that didn't have onboard network interfaces. As soon as I installed the network card and it's software the next reboot slowed WAY DOWN.<

I'm not really a network expert, but it's very rare that you need to install any software that comes with a network card if you're running any of the recent versions of Windows. Usually all it does is offer a fancy GUI and some monitoring tools, all of which can slow down a system. You can usually get away with the driver alone.

I don't think many people realise that the type of network card and the hub/switch has an impact on CPU resources. To give you an example, when looking for a switch most people get the Netgear GS605 because it's good-looking and is Gigabit capable, but it doesn't support jumbo frames and has a 1500 byte MTU limit, both of which mean more CPU overhead. On the other hand, the ugly-looking GS105 supports an MTU of 9216 so is much easier on the host computers.

I've never tried disabling a network interface, but it should be fairly easy by using hardware profiles in control panel.

Since this is vaguely related to the subject under discussion, perhaps I could sneak in a newbie question.

I am connected to the internet on the telephone line via a wireless 2Wire DSL modem, connected to the desktop via an ethernet cable; and it "broadcasts" to my daughter's laptop for her internet connection. I have heard it said that the modem is a router and acts as a "firewall" but I don't understand how it can.

On both the desktop and the laptop we run Kerio Firewall and Avast Antivirus. Kerio is incessantly pointing out after being installed or reinstalled that an application has been changed since last it ran (of course especially after MS updates) or some program wants to contact to the internet and it wants to know what to do. My daughter (a 16-year-old know-it-all) just makes rules saying it's all okay. My question is, do we need the Kerio firewall if we have the modem-cum-router-cum-firewall? And is Avast a good anitvirus program? (As far as I my limited vision can see, it looks good to me.)