Any decvent apps for cleaning up a computer?

[RedinSweden]

You no, binning unnecessary temp files, unused shit.

 

Any recommendations? Also, any general tips for upping performance without upgrading hardware.

 

Cheers!

[Uncle_Meat]

CCleaner - Download

 

That'll clear out all your crap.

 

Optimise your boot process, so the PC starts up a bit quicker with Bootvis. This page explains it better than I.

 

BootVis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

 

Next, how many things have you got starting up with Windows that you actually *need* to start up? A lot of people I know have stuff like Limewire/Yahoo Messenger/various other odds & sods that they don't actually need to auto-start, and of course all this adds a bit to your initial loading time, takes up a certain amount of memory/CPU cycles as it sits there in your taskbar. Check some of these for "run at startup" options and disable them there, or remove the startup entries manually by using the built-in M$ utility "msconfig" (Windows key+R, run from there) , or by using the excellent Autoruns util by Sysinternals.

 

AutoRuns for Windows

 

Finally, of course, give your HDD a decent defrag.

 

Memory is as cheap as chips at the moment. How much have you got, and what type (DDR/DDR2 being common for anything built in the last few years). You can never have enough memory. (Up to 4Gb, with 3Gb or so being actually usable with a 32-bit O/S, that is..). But still, with it being so cheap nowadays you might as well fill your boots.

 

 

What's the spec of your PC, and have you tried overclocking it? A lot of modern gfx cards can handle a half-decent overclock, others can be tweaked quite a lot which will give a decent boost in games.

 

As for the CPU, some overclock better than others, with the Intel Core2 CPUs being excellent for this.

[Duncan Clench]

What he said.

[RedinSweden]

CCleaner - Download

 

That'll clear out all your crap.

 

Optimise your boot process, so the PC starts up a bit quicker with Bootvis. This page explains it better than I.

 

BootVis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

 

Next, how many things have you got starting up with Windows that you actually *need* to start up? A lot of people I know have stuff like Limewire/Yahoo Messenger/various other odds & sods that they don't actually need to auto-start, and of course all this adds a bit to your initial loading time, takes up a certain amount of memory/CPU cycles as it sits there in your taskbar. Check some of these for "run at startup" options and disable them there, or remove the startup entries manually by using the built-in M$ utility "msconfig" (Windows key+R, run from there) , or by using the excellent Autoruns util by Sysinternals.

 

AutoRuns for Windows

 

Finally, of course, give your HDD a decent defrag.

 

Memory is as cheap as chips at the moment. How much have you got, and what type (DDR/DDR2 being common for anything built in the last few years). You can never have enough memory. (Up to 4Gb, with 3Gb or so being actually usable with a 32-bit O/S, that is..). But still, with it being so cheap nowadays you might as well fill your boots.

 

 

What's the spec of your PC, and have you tried overclocking it? A lot of modern gfx cards can handle a half-decent overclock, others can be tweaked quite a lot which will give a decent boost in games.

 

As for the CPU, some overclock better than others, with the Intel Core2 CPUs being excellent for this.

 

CCleaner looks good. I will do that. i checked my start up apps a bit ago, but I might have a go with that app. I like apps.

 

I will check out my memory. i actually don't know how much i have. How do you tell which type it is, does it say it in the hardware profile thing without having to open it? I can acces my PC from here, but i can't open it up, logmein hasn't got that feature yet...

 

I have no idea what overclocking is. What do i need to know, what my gfx card is?

[RobbieOR]

As said above ccleaner is the best.Cleans up all the shite on your computer.

[Uncle_Meat]

Download and run CPU-Z from here.

CPUID

 

That'll give info about your CPU and memory.

 

As for your GFX card, Hardware profile/display properties will tell you that.

[RedinSweden]

 

It seems i only have 1 gb of memory. i will get some on the way home.

 

My gfx card is a Radeon x300/x550 series

[Uncle_Meat]

Righty. DDR2, which is nice n cheap. One of my mates suppliers is listing Kingston lifetime guarantee 1Gb DDR2/800 for less than a tenner at the mo.

 

Thing is, it is best in dual channel which means it goes in matched pairs. So, looking at that screen shot I assume you currently have 2x512Mb sticks of RAM in there.

 

If CPU-Z does not mention how many slots you have for memory, post back with what mainboard you have. If you only have the 2 slots, it means losing your 512s for a pair of 1Gb (or maybe 2Gbs, if you want to push the boat out.) Then again, given how cheap memory is, losing your 2 512s is not any great hardship.

 

CPU. The infamous "Preshot" core P4. Not too much overclocking margin in one of those, especially if you are using a standard cooler as the buggers heat up like nowt on earth. You can get more out of them, dependent upon what overclocking options your mainboard gives you, but the price of a decent cooler to handle that kind of thing sort of negates the performance increase you may get, especially when compared to the price of a modest Core2Duo CPU, which leads neatly on to my next point...

 

The good thing you might have going for you though is that it is a Socket 775 CPU. This is the same socket that the Core2Duos live on, so depending on your motherboard you may be able to get a C2D in there which will be *shitloads* quicker than your P4. Upon fitting a C2D CPU, you'll have to do a repair install of Windows, so it picks up and registers the 2 cores properly, but that's no great deal. As for what C2D, again dependant upon what board you have, but even the cheapest of the C2Ds (E2180/E4400 type ones), even before overclocking, are shitloads faster.

 

 

Video card. Not much you can do with those, but if you find things are lagging when playing games, a decent PCI-E video card can be had relatively cheaply which will give a good increase in frame rates/details. Bear in mind that if you are stuck with that CPU, it may not be worth spending too much on a gfx card as anything upwards of a 9600GT, for example, will end up being limited by the CPU.

[RedinSweden]

My motherboard is according to that ace little app thing

 

[RedinSweden]

having had a quick shufty at the price comparison sites, I can get a Intel E4400 Core2Duo 2.0GHZ 800/2MB s775 for about 70 quid. I will wait and see how these tweaks help. I have cleared a load of crap. I used a nice little app called Treesize to find some shit on the pc. I have binned about 40gb of shit.

[Uncle_Meat]

Dell Dimenion 5000 or similar, looking up that motherboard type?

 

From what I can see, it should have 4 slots for memory so get a pair of 1Gb sticks, lob them in and you're good to go.

 

Looks like that mainboard (Intel 915G chipset limitation, by the looks of it) does not support C2D CPUs, still looking around for some more info to see if it can be shoehorned in somehow.

[Captain]

 

It seems i only have 1 gb of memory. i will get some on the way home.

 

I would think twice about spending any money on this machine. I assume you run Windows XP; do you really need more than 1GB of RAM? Check your task manager to find out.

 

RiS, you basically need a new machine. P4 sucks, to put it bluntly.

[Uncle_Meat]

I would think twice about spending any money on this machine. I assume you run Windows XP; do you really need more than 1GB of RAM? Check your task manager to find out.

 

RiS, you basically need a new machine. P4 sucks, to put it bluntly.

 

Thing is, memory is dirt cheap nowadays. Cheap and transportable. Might as well buy some, if you upgrade to another PC in the near future you can lob the extra memory into that.

 

As for 1Gb and over, depends upon use. I noticed a fair difference, mainly in loading times for levels/less stuttering within levels even going back to a fairly old game such as Call of Duty 2. Also, when opening/closing/fiddling around with loads of apps within Windows, things are just that more responsive as more system files/odds & sods can live in RAM system cache rather than the page file.

 

As you say though, P4s do suck when compared to a C2Ds.

[Nick Leeson]

Best way to improve your day-to-day running speed is to optimise your services. If you go to control panel>Administritive tasks and then open the services menu you'll see a big list of them. See which ones are set to automatic and read the descriptions. Do you need them all?

 

If you're not running wireless turn off wireless zero config. You can turn indexing off aswell, that's a resource hog. Don't touch anything that's got RPC in it. the ones that you turn off need to be disabled too so they don't come back on next time you boot.

 

I'm sure there's a site around if you do some searching which will tell you which ones are safe to turn off and which arent but be warned, turn the wrong ones off and you might have problems until you turn them back on. Turn the right ones off though and your pootah will fly.

[RedinSweden]

I would think twice about spending any money on this machine. I assume you run Windows XP; do you really need more than 1GB of RAM? Check your task manager to find out.

 

RiS, you basically need a new machine. P4 sucks, to put it bluntly.

 

I was aware of that really. I am not interested in getting a new one for a bit though. i just want to get this fella running as well as it can for as little as i can.

[greenoak]

Ive just done a major cleanup on my pc

 

new harddrive so nice fresh install etc, old hard drive as a pure backup drive. added 2 gig ram del for £22 from crucial to go up to 3gig

 

No World of warcraft on my pc anymore. Never want to see that on my pc ever again. only 3 poker sites rather than the 20 I had

 

40 gig of tunes and 20 gigs of movies to sort out next

 

Shame I to have msn for the kids.

 

cccleaner in the startup to

[Unrighteous]

When I saw this thread, the first thought that popped into my mind was, "Oh no, he's RiS'd up his safe porn storage..."

[Nick Leeson]

Here's a link to a site like which I described above. It'll show you all your services which are installed by Windows and tell you what they do and whether to turn them off or not.

 

Windows XP x86 (32-bit) Service Pack 3 Service Configurations by Black Viper

[RedinSweden]

Here's a link to a site like which I described above. It'll show you all your services which are installed by Windows and tell you what they do and whether to turn them off or not.

 

Windows XP x86 (32-bit) Service Pack 3 Service Configurations by Black Viper

 

Cheers gayer. I have cleaned it up loads. It is doing a defrag right now which is taking fucking ages. Then I will whack some new RAM in it and that will be it for me.

[TheBitch]

I'm hijacking this thread rather than starting a new one.

 

I have just done a disc cleanup and it says I can clean up to 5GB of disc space.

 

Only a couple of boxes are ticked and I don't want to delete anything of any use.

 

Anyhoo, one of the un-ticked boxes is 'temporary files' and its 3G, can I delete this without fuckin my shit up?

 

Others include

 

syster error minidump files

per user archived windows error reporting error

per user queued windows error reporting error

system archived windows error reporting error