Thread: From HDD killer to OS messer upper

[MENTAL]Never one to leave well enough alone,[/MENTAL] I recently set off on a mission to try and make my slow (1.6G Celeron single core processor) Laptop faster :happy-f:

Of course anyone who knows anything about computers knows that you should never do I what I was doing....deleting stuff left and right :surprised:! I didn't care, I figured hey, worst case I'll just call a do over....(had this LT for like 2 years now? so in my estimation everything was a good 28-44% slower than it was the day I got the LT)



Well, not only did my mass pruning make it worse - it made it unforeseeably slow (yeah, that's not a word, unforeseeably).

I'm not sure what I did, where I did it, or even when the change occurred but basically it was such that everything dragged the CPU...I mean the task manager, nearly every app or process got in on the CPU and chewed it up.

I was like ok, game over player 1...time for a fresh install. :energetic:



So really it was a blessing in disguise...AND it afforded me the opportunity to do what I've always wanted to do....create a base install with all my programs and then clone that for a day when I think the PC has slowed to a crawl once again. Just clone the HDD and I'm off and running again with a fresh install (minus a few data retrievals).

So while it took the better part of 2 days (cloning with the messed up system (for backup) took well over 8 hours).

I think my registry went from 50MB down to 20!

Oh noes, registry roes! Even as an experienced user, I rarely directly modify my registry, it's just too dangerous in the Windoze world.

The first thing I do on my sister's laptop which has crappy specs (1.6 AMD Semipron [just like a celeron], with 256 MB RAM) is turn off the extras, I switch back to classic style on the start menu and desktop theme. You can do this by right clicking the desktop and selecting properties and right clicking the start menu and clicking properties.

It's a tiny change but seems to speed things up. Also, I run it without AV or a Firewall (other than Windows) even though it's permanetly connected to the net for the little bit of net surfing that my sister does, I'm really not that worried. Plus, I'm confident in my ability to clean out the crap or at the worst format and reinstall windows.

I also recommend this handy little tool: cCleaner which cleans out all your temporary files and junk with one click!

Well you learn from the first time so you can break it even worse the next time lol

When I usually break something to the point where a reinstall in required I just remember not to do what I did to break it in the first place. Then I find a new way to break it lol.

Time to buy a new laptop tim!

Originally Posted by Big Dan

Oh noes, registry roes! Even as an experienced user, I rarely directly modify my registry, it's just too dangerous in the Windoze world.

The first thing I do on my sister's laptop which has crappy specs (1.6 AMD Semipron [just like a celeron], with 256 MB RAM) is turn off the extras, I switch back to classic style on the start menu and desktop theme. You can do this by right clicking the desktop and selecting properties and right clicking the start menu and clicking properties.

It's a tiny change but seems to speed things up. Also, I run it without AV or a Firewall (other than Windows) even though it's permanetly connected to the net for the little bit of net surfing that my sister does, I'm really not that worried. Plus, I'm confident in my ability to clean out the crap or at the worst format and reinstall windows.

I also recommend this handy little tool: cCleaner which cleans out all your temporary files and junk with one click!

I wasn't junking in the registry though, just deleting what I thought were dead or obsolete files from c;\whereever (not even including windoze)

I WAS going to mess w/ the reg but only after I backed it up...didn't even get that far

Originally Posted by wckd

Well you learn from the first time so you can break it even worse the next time lol

When I usually break something to the point where a reinstall in required I just remember not to do what I did to break it in the first place. Then I find a new way to break it lol.

yes, I am good at finding new ways myself!

Originally Posted by tsdesigns

Time to buy a new laptop tim!

I wish. I don't have $500+ bones top drop on one though! Too busy buying photo equip :camera: