Posted: 7/31/2006 3:10:56 AM EDT
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My home computer is running S L O W I think I need to reformat it or something. What can I do to clean all the crap off of it besides running a spyware removal tool. I want to completely zap it, but want a way to keep certain files/programs and keep my favorites and email addresses in outlook. Thanks. |
Save what you want to a disk, make sure you have all your driver software for any hardware you have installed, and reformat. That would be the easiest way to "zap" it clean. I don't have the energy to write a tutorial on reformatting, but it's quite easy really. I'm sure someone can explain it to you. unless you already know how. |
Depends on what OS you are running. Presuming 2000 or one of the XP flavors, right click on the task bar, then left click on 'task manager', then click the 'performance' tab. Also, under the 'process' tab, you can click on the 'CPU' or 'Mem Usage' headers to see which processes are your hogs. I fogot how to check that stuff under WinME or 98. 
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It seems that you are low on memory. The CPU will spike when launching an app, so long as it levels off quickly... It looks like you are using the bulk of your RAM, so the system is forced to use the pagefile. That is slow; that is using your harddrive as a sort of 'RAM', and a HD is generally MUCH slower than physical RAM. If you go to Task Manager>Processes>Sort by 'Mem Usage', you will see what your biggest mem hogs are. For me, Firefox, bless its soul, is using 150meg, not to mention all the other crap that normally runs, so at 256meg, you'll be running out of RAM often. I would bet that if you upgraded to 512 (or a gig even, it's cheap these days), you would see much improved performance. |
+1...... Also, look how much hard drive space you have available. The analogy I use for a hard drive is this.....to access data- your hard drive has to find a needle, the more data that is on the hard drive, the more hay your hard drive has to sift thru every time it needs something.......once you're hard drive is over 50% full you start to get noticeable slowdowns........ However, in your case it's almost definately the RAM- especially if you're running Windows XP in which case 256mb is hardly sufficient........ |