The Official Computer Geeks Thread

[Freebase Dali]

Originally Posted by Zer0

Defragging is indeed quite useful. I defragged the C drive on my dad's computer a few weeks ago because it hadn't been defragged in about two years. It's an old Dell with 512MB RAM and XP and was also one of the slowest computers I've ever used. It basically took hours but it seemed to run a bit quicker and smoother as a result. Also setting the Windows graphic settings to the minimum helped improved the performance even more. I defrag my laptop HD every couple of months and even my ipod the odd time just to keep them working as quickly as possible. One time I somehow ended up with about 10GB extra free space on my laptop HD which was a bit strange.

Yerp.
Another useful tip is to open up services.msc from the run console and disable (or set to manual) any services that are not needed. It's remarkable how many there actually are, running in the background and eating up ram, that don't need to be.

When doing this, it's helpful to google for a guide to the operating system's services and what they do, and whether or not they're critical.

Startup programs is another one that usually needs a good pruning after a system has been at the hands of an average user for any length of time.