# Computer Question. OT/NT



## John J (Dec 29, 2007)

My sisters Dell is running real slow.

Has any one used any of these free on line programs that can your Hard Drive and Seed it up?

Got any suggestiions or on line links you have used. 

JJ


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## Michael Glavin (Jan 2, 2009)

JJ, 

I often deal with this stuff at work/home and for relatives. In my experience things are usually sufficiently jacked up that I recommend a complete reboot or reload of the Operating System; start fresh, update-update-update and install some sort of virus protection/Internet security program and go on with your life… 

Many times things get convoluted from adding-removing programs, loading undesirable stuff and of course other malicious software/programs. These so called “increase your speed” offerings have some merit and work sometimes, however they most certainly aren’t the Holy Grail in computer clean-up. An experienced computer cleaner often is able to work through all the clutter and restore things but its time consuming. Just about anyone can reload the Dell restore disc and work through the rest. 

FWIW: the “Increase My Speed” stuff works well on computers on a routine maintenance basis. Then again a GOOD Antivirus/Internet Security Protection program does the same thing for the most part and LOT's more. 

Oh yeah, many of those freebies come with undesirable freebies too! 

Michael


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## Gary Armitstead (Jan 2, 2008)

JJ,

I've always found that if I completely wipe my hard drives clean (AFTER a complete back-up, of course







)and reload the OS, that my computers ALWAYS run significantly better.









Don't get scammed by downloading these online programs that get rid of viruses and supposedly make your machine faster. Waste of money and they can add malware and other items you don't want.


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## Randy Stone (Jan 2, 2008)

JJ 

If you don't want to rebuild the computer by wiping everything out and having to reload everything, you might try Malwarebytes.com in case you have malware viruses sucking the power down. 

They have a free program and I used it. 

Another thing to look at is your hard drive space. I have a PC that has XP on it. It was updated to Windows 7 and now the hard drive is darn near full. Out of 18.5 GBI only have 2.34 GB of free space. 

So I got an external hard drive and moved everything I could over to it. That helped speed it up. 

Do a disc clean up and a defrag.


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## steam5 (Jun 22, 2008)

Posted By rlvette on 12 May 2011 06:33 PM 
Another thing to look at is your hard drive space. I have a PC that has XP on it. It was updated to Windows 7 and now the hard drive is darn near full. Out of 18.5 GBI only have 2.34 GB of free space. 
. 
They just put more and more into operating systems and I wonder if the extra hard drive space needed for updated operating systems is justified or sloppy programming?


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## chuck n (Jan 2, 2008)

I'm not an IT expert, but my daughter is, and she says that when your internal memory is over half full, performance will start to drop. If you get rid of everything you don't use regularly on the hard disk, speed should improve. Store photos, movies, anything you don't use on a regular basis on an external hard drive. Free up the CPU for real work not storage.

Chuck


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## Semper Vaporo (Jan 2, 2008)

I have a short list of programs that I use to clean a PC, but I would not recommend any of them to just anybody to go run them and yer good to go... MUCH TOO DANGEROUS!.

I am supposed to know what I am doing, but I have shot myself in the foot a few times by using one of the tools to clean things just a little bit too much.

No, I have never broken a PC to the point where it melted and dribbled off the desk and onto the floor, but I have "accidentally" deleted some file or other that was needed by an esoteric program that failed to follow the murky and rapidly changing set of vaguely defined "rules" of where to put files and what extension they should have, etc., etc., etc. Cleaner type programs can also be aggressive at deleting "cookies" and I have had to remember a password or two, or re-setup a set of web site preferences when I let them be so aggressive.

But for all the neat things that these programs can do automatically, MY experience with repairing other people's PCs is that it takes a human sitting at the computer making decisions about what to delete or re-arrange. The majority of the causes of "slowness' is that the owner has a propensity to install absolutely EVERYTHING that is offered in their wandering on the internet. Every one of these random programs was written by a conceited programmer that believes that their program is the most glorious bit of software ever written and thus the owner of the PC will want to have access to that program instantaneously and thus it must be loaded as soon as the computer is turned on and it must load all of its libraries and routines into memory and put its lovely little icon in the Task Bar System Tray area.

I help a lot of people with their computers and I require that they sit with me and tell me what they do with their computer and what programs they use and what ones they have no idea what they are or where they came from or why they are loading at boot time. I have found computers that loaded over 100 programs on boot up! Dozens of photo apps that all do the same thing but each takes its toll on the available memory and run time. Dozens of so called "Web Apps" that show the temperature and weather forecast in Beijing, San Francisco, London and Moscow, as well as opening three different versions of some chat or instant message app (the 1st two of which take time and memory to load and then get usurped by the last one and thus never do anything but take CPU resources). I have seen game software being loaded for games that the parent let their child play once and then deleted it, but the special hardware drivers and other junk is still being loaded at bootup and the kid is now off to college!!

The tools I use are:


"RegCure" by ParetoLogic... This program is NOT free but it will let you scare yourself by making a list of all the "problems" you have in your "Registry" for free. The program will clean (for free) only two of the about a dozen categories of things it checks, and they are not the major groups of junk that can accumulate in the Registry. You have to buy a yearly license to get it to clean everything it finds.
It also has a handy feature that will let you look at a list of programs that start at bootup and temporarily disable any of them and then reboot to see what you lost and if you care. If you break something that you really do use, then you can put that one back in the list and reboot again to get it back... After a few months of running my PC with some of these programs disabled, I usually then go back to that list and completely delete any program that I am not fretting over not finding it loaded and ready to go. I also use this feature to disable a lot of the Automatic Update features of many programs (Adobe Reader, Google Update, etc.), but keep the item in the "Disabled" list so I can re-enable one and reboot to let it do something I need for a moment (like do a monthly update)... I mean, WHY does this program need to use resources constantly checking to see if there is an update for a program I run only once or twice a month???


I used to purchase a RegCure license for any computer I worked on, but I have not renewed my present license on my PC this year because I am finding that Win 7 does not have quite the problems with junk in the registry... maybe it is because I have learned to stop installing every piece of software that someone recommends! I also have some other tools that do some of the same things (though not quite as well or thoroughly).



"CCleaner" by Piriform... This FREE (home/private use) program can improve any disk space problems by deleting all kinds of useless junk... it can also shoot you in the foot by deleting something that was not quite so useless! It also can clean the Registry of some of the junk in it, but it is not as thorough as RegCure (which might be a good thing!). It also has the Startup program "Disabling" feature that RegCure has. I think this program is pretty good, but if you don't know what you are doing (or letting it do) you WILL be sorry... not "blow yer brains out" sorry, but maybe a few cuss words sorry.



"Spybot Search & Destroy" by SaferNetworking, Inc.... This free program is mainly an Anti- Malware (per the program name!) but it also has a registry cleaner function that has found things that neither RegCure nor CCleaner found, but it does not find nearly as many things as either of the other two programs. It also has the Start Up "Disable" feature, but it does not list as many programs as the other two programs.



"AutoRuns" by Microsoft... Probably the most thorough of the programs for listing what programs run when you turn the computer on and just as easy to use as the others, but you will be overwhelmed by the number of programs that Winders starts at boot up! MOST of them you absolutely have to keep or Winders is broke, but I have found stuff being loaded from programs I had deleted from the computer (some library files get stored in system directories and not with the program and thus do not necessarily get deleted when the program is uninstalled). It also has the ability to mark a program to not be loaded at start up and you can then reboot to see if it will even complete the reboot process... MAJOR WARNING THERE if you are paying attention! An interesting oddity here. I found many programs listed by AutoRuns and it showed that it could not find the file to be loaded! Okay, then why even have it in the list? Right? Nope... I found two files that must be listed, even though AutoRuns cannot find the file that is to be loaded. Both are associated with the IESpell utility for Internet Explorer. I don't know why, but even though AutoRuns cannot find the referenced file, if you delete the entry then Spell Check does not work.



AGAIN, If you do NOT know what you are doing, I do NOT recommend ANY so called "Clean up program" (in my list of tools or not), nor do I recommend any of the web sites that claim to clean your PC. The stuff that can be deleted with impunity is not what is causing the majority of any perceived slowness of the computer. The stuff that needs to be deleted is usually something that needs the user to make decisions about what to keep and what to pitch.


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## steam5 (Jun 22, 2008)

Posted By chuck n on 12 May 2011 06:50 PM 
I'm not an IT expert, but my daughter is, and she says that when your internal memory is over half full, performance will start to drop. If you get rid of everything you don't use regularly on the hard disk, speed should improve. Store photos, movies, anything you don't use on a regular basis on an external hard drive. Free up the CPU for real work not storage.

Chuck 



Chuck I'm not either. But I'm not sure if when your daughter says memory, she means RAM and not Hard drive space. I think there is a link between a near full hard drive to performamce, but only very small. Unlike RAM, once that's getting used up the performance will drop much more.

Alan


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## chuck n (Jan 2, 2008)

I think that she was talking about the hard drive.

Chuck


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## krs (Feb 29, 2008)

Posted By chuck n on 12 May 2011 07:54 PM 
I think that she was talking about the hard drive.


Yes - there is no such thing as making sure you have some percentage of RAM free at all times.
But specifying a percentage free for the hard drive is an outdated way of looking at it. When hard drives were 20GB or even 40GB, stating that 25% should always be free and available made some sense - that would have been 5 to 10 GB.
Today with 1, 2 and even 3 TB drives (1 TB is 1000GB), it doesn't make sense to suggest a "free" space of even 25% since that would be anywhere from 250GB to 750GB of fre space required.

I think a minimum of 10GB of free hard drive space (or even somewhat less) would be fine - you definitely don't want to get into the MB range when it comes to free hard drive space.

RAM is a different kettle of fish. It can be used up to 100%. If the requirement goes beyond that, then the CPU will swap storage space between the RAM and the hard drive - that swap process will slow down the computer quite a bit. There should be a place on Windows to check for page outs and page ins - this basically keeps a track of how often memory swaps between the RAM and the hard drive have taken place.
If that number is large, adding more RAM will speed things up.

If the OP doesn't want to go through the effort of saving all the data, wiping the hard drive and reinstalling the OS and all applications, I would suggest to clean out all the temp and log files, scan for malware and gert rid of any, then defrag the hard drive and see if that speeds things up.


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## Semper Vaporo (Jan 2, 2008)

At one time Microsoft recommended that the "Swap File" be one and a half to two times the amount of RAM in the computer. I think this was stupid advice. If you had lots of RAM you didn't need a Swap File at all, but if you had very little RAM then you would need a big Swap File.

The REAL amount of Swap File needed should be a function of the sum of all of the software and data needed by windows to do its job, plus the software and data for any programs that the user expected to be running at the same time, minus the amount of RAM in the computer. For example: if windows requires a couple of meg and you want to run two programs simultaneously and they each take a couple of meg and the data for each program amounted to a meg each then you needed a total of 2+2+2+1+1 meg or 8-meg. if you had 4 meg of RAM then you needed a 4 meg Swap File (or a wee bit more). If you only had 2 meg of RAM then you needed at least 6 meg of Swap File.

The problem would be that when Windows needed some different piece of code to accomplish an out of the ordinary task then something in RAM would have to be copied out to the Swap File and the needed piece of code brought in from the Swap File. Same thing happens to the application programs that are running. Even more so for accessing different pieces of the data being manipulated. All this swapping of the content of memory out and back into memory takes time and that makes the system seem slow. Doubling the amount of RAM in the computer would reduce the necessity of swapping so much and things would be much faster, but the total amount of memory (RAM and Swap File) could remain the same. The more RAM you had the greater the chances that a piece of code or data would already be in RAM and so less swapping would be needed.

Making the Swap File bigger would not help with speed, but you could then run more programs or handle larger data files simultaneously at about the same speed or slower.

This was all fine and dandy back then but now the Swap File is determined by some algorithm inside of Winders and the user has little control over it. To compound that, the amount of data that is being manipulated has gone up a hundred fold (or maybe a thousand fold) with the need to store more images (icons, Avatars, photos, drawings, animations, videos... ) and all the other stuff that comes from the internet in order to show just a simple web page. Rather than put all that stuff in the Swap File (or what ever it is called in Windows XP and up) there is an Temporary Internet Files folder. This folder is designed to hold everything that it can, given the amount of disk space available. If more is to be stored in it than the disk can hold, then the files that were accessed the longest ago are deleted to make room for the new stuff. Of course if something that was just deleted now is needed again it has to be downloaded from the internet again, resulting is a slowdown for the download and some other piece of data is getting deleted, too.

All this adding and deleting of data results in data being splattered all over the disk as holes show up in deleteing files and get filled as more data is downloaded and written to the disk. Sometimes to fetch a single large file from the disk the disk head needs to be moved from one track to another to get the pieces in the order needed and all that head movement takes time and thus the more it has to move due to the fragmentation of the files the slower the access is and naturally you notice that the computer is slow.


To improve the speed of disk accesses, clear all the files from the Temporary areas (yes that means everything will have to be downloaded all over again!) and delete all the programs that you haven't used since you installed them, and then defrragment the drive. This defragmentation moves the remaining files around to fill the holes and puts all the pieces of them together, and in order, so accessing them is faster since the heads won't have to move all over the place to gather the sections of data. And as new data is added, there are larger empty spaces available to store the whole file in one contiguous place which means it can be accessed faster too.




Of course now we talk in terms of Gigabytes instead of Megabytes but the principle is the same.


And for those of you that complain about "Windows bloat"... how much do you like being able to drag and drop from one program window to another? How would you like to go back to the days where you had to find the program you wanted to run, then use it to find the data you wanted it to work on, instead of just double-clicking on the data file and Winders figuring out that you want to use a certain program to do the manipulation? Do you like being able to go to a web page and view photos and play a video without haveing to download the file and then open a program for viewing that type of file and then open the file to actually get to see the result. Do you like the "Context Menu" that you get when you Right-Click on something? Do you like those full color images or would you like to go back to the blotchy 256 color pictures of the wife and kids where they all look like they have a serious skin condition? Have you ever marveled at running Google Earth? Zoom in on anyplace on earth, pan over to the next state and look at something else Or have you drawn a 3-D object in Google SketchUp? Drag out a square, pull the surface "up" and produce a cube. Draw a circle on the side and push it through to drill a hole in the cube and then map a photograph on the side of the cube and then rotate the cube in any direction and see how the photo moves in 3-D. WOW! Look what you can do with all that "bloat"!


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## krs (Feb 29, 2008)

Talking about "Windows Bloat" - I'm sure Microsoft could do something about that if they so desired. 
Windows 7 requires 20GB of free hard drive space to install the 64-bit version. 

In comparison. Apple Leopard requires 9GB of hard drive space and then Apple decided that the next version of their OS - Snow Leopard - was going to have a minimum of new capability but rather be a complete lean and mean recode and the hard drive space required for it dropped to 5GB, almost half of Leopard. 
I see no reason why Microsoft could not do something similar with Windows, recode it and cut the hard drive requirements in half. 
As a side benefit, the OS would also become snappier.


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## Ralph Berg (Jun 2, 2009)

In this day of cheap 1TB drives, I hardly expect M$ to spend a pile of money to save 5GB. 
Ralph


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## Greg Elmassian (Jan 3, 2008)

I manage an IT department as part of my job, and have used Windows for work since 1.0. I do some consulting for "train money" too, for a few people all of you know, just got a new box car in fact. 

But, a few comments, we have about 400 computers we us a "formula" on for restoring the speed of computers and a number of free tools to do this. 

1. I have NEVER had an occasion where I needed to be CAREFUL about what CCleaner deleted, files or registry. That's 400 computers, and many of my personal clients. 
2. You DO have control over the windows swap file, just set the size manually. Basically with ram so cheap, just make it small, and set the max and min size the same, there's plenty of reasons for this, but I won't bore everyone with detailed technical explanation. 
3. Yes, when you start to run out of ram, the stupid Windows operating system tries to use the swap file. It seems to be when you are at about 80-90% of ram, but I don't know the exact number. It's definitely not at 50% ram. 
4. Your hard drive is approximately 1,000 times slower than your ram memory, so using the swap file makes a HUGE difference in performance. 

Just a few tidbits based on what I have read above. 

Greg 
4. Import


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## Semper Vaporo (Jan 2, 2008)

Greg:

Please run CCleaner and then "check" the following boxes:

Windows:
Internet Explorer
Cookies
Index.dat files
Autocomplete Form History
Saved Passwords
Windows Explorer
Recent Documents
Run (in Start menu)
Other Explorer MRUs
Thumbnail cache
System
FTP Accounts
Start Menu Shortcuts
Desktop Shortcuts
Advanced
Menu Order Cache
Tray Notifications Cache
Window Size/Location Cache
Custom Files and Folders

Be a bit CARELESS and pay no attention to any dialog boxes that come up when you are checking those checkboxes and pay no attention the huge list of things what am gonna get wiped out after you click "Analyse" and just click the "Run Cleaner" button. Oh, and don't waste your time clicking the "Options" tool and the "Cookies" section to move any of them to the "Cookies to Keep" list, I am sure it makes no difference if you lose the ability to log into some websites (I bet you remember the autologon passwords that some sites store in a Cookie and that order you are building in that on-line store can be rebuilt the next time you log-in to complete the order... Uh you do remember your account number, don't you?). It also won't matter if most of your Start menu comes up empty, or your desktop icons all dissappear. And nobody ever uses those Recent Documents lists and we all have plenty of time for Windows to re-create thumbnails of all the images in various folders. Not all of those options above will frustrate you on all computers, but for some computers they can make for really, really mad clients!

Now, go do the same thing to someone else's computer!

Better yet... leave CCleaner on somebody else's PC and let THEM decide they can run that program just as well as you and save themselves your fee by doning the "Clean Up" themselves. Hee hee, if I charged for helping people with their computer this situation sounds like an excuse to charge more! Kind of like that sign at the car repair shop I saw many years ago: "$20 per hour base fee, $50 per hour if the customer watches, $100 per hour if he helps."


I have only had trouble with CCleaner's Registry cleaner portion once. A client's computer had some software where a program stored a key in the registry that pointed to a non-existent file to indicate the software was registered... oops CCleaner deleted the invalid key and thus "unregistered" the program... Before the client called me they paid a fee to re-register the program.


Yes, the more RAM in a PC the faster it will work... RAM is a whole lot faster than having to store stuff in a Swap File on the harddisk. And, Yes, Memory is CHEAP! BUT, when ever I salvage a PC I always save the memory sticks and GIVE them to the next person that needs additional memory in their PC... I GIVE it to them because they can't AFFORD to purchase memory; often the PC being a hand-me-down or GoodWill/Salvation Army rehab they got on the cheap via a charitable organization. Unfortunately, I have a whole gob of 64 Meg and 128 Meg memory sticks, having substituted from my stash 256's for them, in order to double the memory in their PC in the two slots available on the Motherboard. But those PCs now with a whole 1/2 gig are in need of a large Swap File and that Swap File is taxed to its limits and the harddrive thrashes continuously as Winders swaps things around and around.



There are many tools to keep your computer working well, but if you are not CAREFUL... BLAM you could be missing some virtual toes!


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## Greg Elmassian (Jan 3, 2008)

Semp... I have run CCleaner thousands (yes thousands) of times. 

My team (at work) installs it and unchecks the three cookie/password related items on all installations unless there is a "total cleaning", or the user is notified of this. 

And yes, I remember about 100 passwords, but they ARE written down and backed up, and for personal clients and for our company users all of this is gone over on a checklist first, that is 2 columns single spaced that covers a whole page. 

And it does not clear out your start menu, or desktop icons, if you believe this, then you might want to study the difference between start menu and start menu cache for example. (ccleaner cleans the cache, but that is OPTIONAL and not checked by default) 

And yes we advise people about recent documents cache, but we also educate our users on how to organize their files and where to put them, so clearing the last documents cache is never a problem. (relying on your last documents cache is lame) 

We help users understand how their computers work, and where files are (at work). My personal clients get free education, and a record is kept of their personal preferences and things we need to watch for, like relying on this kind of transient data. 

Yep, I give memory and whole computers to people myself, including laptops. When people upgrade, I ask for their old machines to donate, and cobble stuff together for others less fortunate. 

I do agree, with SP3, 512 megs is no londer enough with XP... it used to be... I just rebuilt a machine for my cousin and it has (memory is on it's way) only 128 megs... it was fine before SP2... it was ok after SP2, and disk thrashed after SP3 (and all the other updates associated with each "step"). 

In all my years, I have never personally lost any data, and the only clients that have lost data are ones that refuse to back up and suffer hardware losses, or just indiscriminately surf and get nasty viruses. 

Been doing (and constantly learning) this BEFORE DOS 1.0.... I had personal computers before that time. (of course doing anything a long time is not prima facie evidence that you know anything at all, ha ha!) 

Greg


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## Semper Vaporo (Jan 2, 2008)

Posted By Greg Elmassian on 14 May 2011 12:00 AM 
Semp... I have run CCleaner thousands (yes thousands) of times. 

My team (at work) installs it and unchecks the three cookie/password related items on all installations unless there is a "total cleaning", or the user is notified of this. 

And yes, I remember about 100 passwords, but they ARE written down and backed up, and for personal clients and for our company users all of this is gone over on a checklist first, that is 2 columns single spaced that covers a whole page. 

And it does not clear out your start menu, or desktop icons, if you believe this, then you might want to study the difference between start menu and start menu cache for example. (ccleaner cleans the cache, but that is OPTIONAL and not checked by default) 

And yes we advise people about recent documents cache, but we also educate our users on how to organize their files and where to put them, so clearing the last documents cache is never a problem. (relying on your last documents cache is lame) 

We help users understand how their computers work, and where files are (at work). My personal clients get free education, and a record is kept of their personal preferences and things we need to watch for, like relying on this kind of transient data. 

Yep, I give memory and whole computers to people myself, including laptops. When people upgrade, I ask for their old machines to donate, and cobble stuff together for others less fortunate. 

I do agree, with SP3, 512 megs is no londer enough with XP... it used to be... I just rebuilt a machine for my cousin and it has (memory is on it's way) only 128 megs... it was fine before SP2... it was ok after SP2, and disk thrashed after SP3 (and all the other updates associated with each "step"). 

In all my years, I have never personally lost any data, and the only clients that have lost data are ones that refuse to back up and suffer hardware losses, or just indiscriminately surf and get nasty viruses. 

Been doing (and constantly learning) this BEFORE DOS 1.0.... I had personal computers before that time. (of course doing anything a long time is not prima facie evidence that you know anything at all, ha ha!) 

Greg 




Well... fascinating... CCleaner removed all user added entries in the Start menu (both user specific and those installed for "all" users) and reduced the desktop to just the Recycle bin the last time I tried those settings (was one of those "Whaaa?" moments), but I have not tried it since (for what might be obvious reasons!). One of my (former) clients also did it and then cussed me out over the phone even though I had told her what would happen!

I have many clients that vehemently do not want to understand how a computer works. I am treated as the 'Refridgerator Repair Man'... "There it is, go fix it." And no amount of warning will stop them from believing everything they get in an e-mail or see on screen from any website... Click here if you want money; Click here if you love God; Forward this to 20 people and something wonderful will suddenly appear on your screen; Your computer has a virus, send us money and we will remove it for you.

I like CCleaner and recommend it, but not without a warning to be careful. Same as for any tools. Software tools can be just as dangerous as hand tools where way too many people use a hammer to pound their thumb instead of the screw they are aiming at.


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## Greg Elmassian (Jan 3, 2008)

Never had it do that Semp, BUT, be sure you are not confusing the "last program used" cache on the start menu... this may be fooling you... those programs usually appear ABOVE the "official" ones assigned to the start menu by the user, and also the ones he inherits from the "all users" ... I think this is what happened... I always turn off the "last programs" display on the start menu for precisely that issue, they are transient, not actually assigned to the start menu.... 

Desktop is weird, that makes no sense... it really sounds more like you have not disabled the "desktop cleanup wizard" and somehow something triggered the "cleaning"... yet another default setting from Windoze that is a pain in the butt... 

Yes, there are people who do not want to know how it works... those clients of mine that have that demeanor are either on an every 6 months maintenance program (where typically the computer is barely alive by that time) or they are no longer clients because there is no way to make them happy, it's just not worth it for either party. 

Your warning is good Semp, although many of the items we are discussing are NOT the default settings... the only "dangerous" default settings are the ones to clear cookies and passwords... in my opinion... 

(I NEVER allow anyone to run ANY software by themselves the first time, I always do a remote session and show them... if they do not really want to understand, cool, they are admonished to NOT TOUCH the settings and to NOT UPDATE or UPGRADE) 

Again, I have (probably) fewer clients, but they are all happy. Oh, their computers also run fine.. ha ha... 

Greg


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## Semper Vaporo (Jan 2, 2008)

It was on an XP laptop, and it essentially deleted most of the entries in the "C:\Documents and Settings\xxxx\Start Menu" and "... xxxx\Desktop" folders (where 'xxxx' is both the user's name and "All Users"). I didn't take the time to determine why it left some entries in the Start Menu folders (some were still in both the individual user's folder and the "All Users" folder). Since there was only one "user" I have no idea if it would have affected other users' folders too.

I was in the process of cleaning the PC after a massive removal of obsolete programs and the installation of several new programs and I had run RegCure and CCleaner as well as defragged the harddrive several times during the process. I had already manually removed bogus entries from the Start Menu and Desktop that the uninstalls failed to touch so there was nothing there that was not supposed to be there, and I had already run several of the program from both the Desktop icon and Start menu entries (to finish installation and registration) so I know they were there and working.

On what was to be one of my last steps in the clean up I thought, "Gee, I've added and deleted a lot of programs, I wonder if there is anything that CCleaner could clean up in the Start Menu and Desktop that I missed?" But tic'ing those item's checkboxes was not unlike grabbing a bottle of battery acid instead of Orange Clean to remove a grease spot on my favourite shirt.

Restoring those folders from the last backup was kind of silly since it would put back what I had deleted and not put back what had just been installed, so I had to go find each program and re-create each shortcut (and I probably missed a few ancillary shortcuts (uninstal programs, help files, website links, etc.) that the install put in, but few people ever know about or use them... The programs I wanted then worked fine so I didn't care about the rest).


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## Greg Elmassian (Jan 3, 2008)

Weird, never had that happen, and I have run it thousands of times... sounds like user file corruption... or what I mentioned before... I see this happen once in a while... windows will rebuild the desktop if it gets corrupted... 

Had it happen to quite a few computers last month on "Microsoft Tuesday"... no surprise... 

By the way, the nicest free defragger I have found is ultradefrag... seems the only one that does the boot time defrag that most others don't ... I have the small office version of PerfectDisk myself (you get one license for a windows server and like 5 workstation licenses... ) 

Still a big defrag fan... 

Greg


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## jgallaway81 (Jan 5, 2009)

@import url(http://www.mylargescale.com/Provide...ad.ashx?type=style&file=SyntaxHighlighter.css);@import url(/providers/htmleditorproviders/cehtmleditorprovider/dnngeneral.css); Hey Greg, do you consider defrags worth the extra time and trouble to carry out? I've found, especially with SATA drives and faster access times, that I don't really see any speed improvement after a defrag any more. 

To background myself, I've been a DOS/Windows user since '87, and have used every version of windows since 3.0. I abhor Vista, but have found 7 to be... acceptable, though still not superior to XP. However, I've since moved from XP to Linux, so its kind of a moot point there. My main problem lately has been trying to learn all the different ways to do tasks I knew how to do in windows.


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## Greg Elmassian (Jan 3, 2008)

If your disk has a ton of extra space (like 90% free) you probably won't notice fragmentation.... but most computers improve noticeably with defragging. Over the years, the Microsoft algorithm has not changed, it really promotes fragmentation. 

Download a free defragger, or better yet, to to Raxco.com, and download the free 30 day trial of PerfectDisk, and be sure to defrag your boot files... it makes a difference. If you never use large files or programs, you might not notice a difference, but I do it on all my computers. 

Greg


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## Dan Pierce (Jan 2, 2008)

When assisting others on slow computers, I found the tmp directories to be huge, and on several I found as many as 4 virus programs running at the same time. This will make a fast computer turn into a 8086 running windows XP at 1 mhz!!!! Took 35 minutes to load. 

These were not reloaded, just 'fixed' by me and almost as good as new.


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## Greg Elmassian (Jan 3, 2008)

Dan's tip actually extends to all software, many programs "offer" you other programs for installation when upgrading... a common is another antivirus program, watch out for the one from microsoft, more than one AV program will "fight" amongst each other... also toolbars, scanners, printer monitoring software (to tell you ink level), and on and on. 

Greg


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