PCs slowing down with age.

I often get asked about Windows PCs that seem to slow down as they age. People sometimes tell me they have to wipe out the hard drive and reinstall Windows once in a while. Somehow the fairy tale has gotten started that Windows XP gets senile and has to be reborn once in a while. This is absolutely a fairy tale, and not true.

Reinstalling Windows is obviously a huge pain in the neck. It is not necessary either. What is happening in many cases is this: the page and/or registry files are getting fragmented. If your C drive has ever been over 90% full, this is very likely to be the case (especially if you installed software or ran some big piece of software while it was almost full).

When the PCs I care for start slowing down, here's what I do. All these steps are in aid of defragmenting the paging and registry files.

1. Download Mark Russinovich's fabulous little free program called PageDefrag from http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/PageDefrag.html. Follow the directions on his web site to install the program and figure out whether your page file (or the files containing your registry) are fragmented. If they are fragmented (that is, if they have more than one fragment each), keep going with this little procedure.
2. Open up Start > Settings > Control Panel / Add or Remove Programs. Go through the list of installed programs, and uninstall stuff you don't recognize or stuff you know you don't use any more.
3. Open up Start > Settings > Control Panel / Internet Options. Choose the General tab, then hit the Delete Files button. Check "Delete all offline content" then hit OK. This cleans out the Internet Explorer cache.
4. If you use some browser besides Internet Explorer, clear out its file cache as well. In Firefox, choose Tools > Options ... / Privacy / Cache, then hit the Clear Cache Now button.
5. Download the free Ad-Aware SE Personal and do a full scan. (http://www.lavasoftusa.com/)
6. Download and scan with the free Spybot Search and Destroy. (http://spybot.safer-networking.de/en/)
7. Empty the Recycle Bin (right click on it, choose Empty Recycle Bin).
8. Delete temp files. To do this, do Start / Run ... then type %temp% (with percent signs before and after), then hit OK. You'll get a list of temp files. Press Ctrl-A (select all) then hit shift - Delete (to delete the files without putting them in the Recycle bin). Occasionally the system will protest that some file is in use and refuse to delete it. In that case try again: Press Ctrl-A, then hold the control key and click on the file that can't be deleted (to deselect it), then hit shift -Delete. The purpose is to delete as many of these temporary files as you can. Don't worry about the ones you can't delete.
   
9. If you are using XP Pro, find out if you're using a lot of disk space for system restore points. (If you're using XP Home Edition, ignore this step.) Right click on My Computer and choose Properties. Look at the System Restore tab. It should say "Drive C (C:) Monitoring." Click on Drive C, then hit Settings... The maximum amount of disk space to use is most likely 12%. Unless you install and uninstall stuff a lot, you can reduce this to 9% or 6% without bad effect, and free up a bunch of disk space on the C drive.
10. Delete any other data files you don't need, or move them to another disk.
11. Defrag your C drive. Defrag it three times in a row. (XP's defrag does a little more each time).
12. Run PageDefrag again. Check the option to Defrag at Next Boot.
13. Restart your computer.

This should make a windows computer that is slowing down speed up again.