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You pay a small fortune for computers, yet in a relatively short period of time, either they or the software they host is obsolete, outdated, slow, decrepit and just plain aggravating.
Ken’s computer is only 3 years old, yet it draaaaaaaaaaggggggs along. I’ve checked it for spyware, viruses and other malicious software, but there is none present. He never downloads anything except emails and I’ve taught him to be very careful about which of those he opens. So why is it that his once rather snappy machine has become so creakily slow lately?
Oh it’s not something that happened overnight. No, this has been creeping up on us for the past year probably. I wonder if a memory upgrade would help. I hate to spend money on it if there’s no chance of it helping. I’m sorry now that I didn’t cannibalize my old machine’s memory before I took it to the thrift shop. I could have split it up between his and mine. I guess I was too concerned with trying to get all my files off the hard drive and lost sight of the other, useable things I could have retrieved from the machine.
What I figure I’ll have to do is to copy his files over to my thumb drive and reinstall his OS. I’ve tried to defragment, run system sweeps and so forth but only got a tiny bit of gain from doing all of those things. He’s been looking at a new computer, but doesn’t really want to spend the money right now with Christmas and having just had to pay a pretty penny for the emergency vet bill for Delilah and I can’t blame him.
Guess I will just have to bite the bullet and take the couple of hours it will probably take to copy the files, reinstall the OS and then reinstall all his programs.
Sounds like a project for this weekend, huh?
Anybody have any other tricks up their sleeves?
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I do not know too much about hardware but it most certainly sounds as if you have already done everything you could have done to speed the machine up. I do not think a memory upgrade will help much because if this was the problem the machine would have been slow from the start.
A while ago my machine slowed down as well but this was fixed with a simple defrag. You said you have already tried this so you have another problem somewhere. Maybe you could ask this question over at the EC forum, there seems to be a couple of pretty knowledgeable folk there.
Sorry I cannot offer anything more. If you find a solution please keep us informed. This is something we could all experience somewhere along the line.
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Yes, My laptop has gone all ‘clunky’ like this. I try to keep it clean and germ-free but still it grinds… I think obsolescence is programmed in.
Ken Armstrong´s last blog post..Memories of Pants
@Lyndi — thanks I have it planned to do the reinstall of the OS and think that will probably do the trick. I probably have something mucked up in the registry keys and that will clear all that out.
@Ken – gosh I hope that’s not so!
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We had a computer that was just draggggging along, and just miserable to work with. My husband put linux on it, and now that things zips. I know Windows has a bunch of stuff going on in the background, and when your computer gets a bit dated every little background thing makes it worse.
My laptop’s 3 years old now, and starting to make me cranky. But it still does what I need it to, so I can’t justify a new one, ya know?
Good luck with yours!
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I own and run a Computer business.
My opinion? It’s unusual for a 3 year old Computer to need any more hardware fillip to get to its previous performance.
Formatting the hard disk and a clean reinstall of the OS is one way to restore performance.
Other contributors to the slowness is an over-packed temp folder, a hard disk that is almost filled to data storage capacity or a hard disk that is largely fragmented.
(It’s highly improbable that the Registry is corrupted cos that would create havoc with even a normal run of the OS)
Just my 2 cents.
Solutions: delete and empty your temp folder, delete unwanted files/uninstall unwanted and unused programs and defragment the hard disk.
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@Eryn — yeah, but for the computer challenged like my husband is, Linux and Open Office would be more than he’s able to comprehend. No, we have to stick to tidy whities for this guy
@Windmill — I thought I have cleaned out the temp folders and there is absolutely no way he’s out of disc space! And I’ve done a defrag of the disc which wasn’t very fragmented according to the defragger to begin with.
I believe I’m stuck….
Thanks!
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