HOW TO SPEED UP A SLOW PC OR INFECTED PC. (a mini guide)

novice-saver

closed wrote: »

for most tasks, you'd probably hardly notice any difference, processors have had enough power to do most things quickly for some time, it's only acccumulated software bloat that slows things down - factory restore is a quick (10 minute) way of putting them back to their former glory (but removes all data)

I beg to differ regarding the time it takes to restore a four year old PC to fully patched, updated, and all the software you use on a daily basis re-installed.

Yes, you can get back to "out of the box" relatively quickly - I'd guess nearer 30 mins than 10, but it took me another day to get a Windows 7 upgrade installed, all my [STRIKE]clutter[/STRIKE]100+gig of archived data and the relevant programs reinstalled, plus the 205 updates (I just checked that number).

It was worth the effort though - I was seriously considering binning it.

closed

The time to do updates etc wasn't mentioned, but those tasks and copying data etc can be left to do themselves over a few days/reboots, no watching required. Adding software depends on the user, some have no extra software, some have loads. The factory restore time varies from model to model, and depends on the every growing size of the the os, but it's usually always in minutes, and is far faster than trying to wade through and find the cause of slowness.

dmliverpool

Good advice. The ultimate clean up is a clean install that wipes everything and then copying all your data back to the computer and reinstalling everything.

petermead83

Ive found the main reason for a few of the PC's ive seen for being slow is that overtime more and more programs are loaded onto the PC, and so when they start up, they are loading so many applications. You can reduce this by:

In Windows, go to Start>Run, enter 'msconfig' go to the STartup tab and untick applicatiosn you dont want running at startup.

Restart your PC, and it will startup will less running in the background. You'll be surprised whats starting up with your PC. This will free up memory and should see a speed improvement as well.

sb44

It says to download Avast version 7, should we download version 9.0.2007 now or still version 7?

Ta.

closed

The link to the latest version is in post 1

sb44

closed wrote: »

The link to the latest version is in post 1

Thanks very much .

captainphillips

I just bought a laptop and it is in windows 8, do you think I should put an antivirus or not?

aliEnRIK

captainphillips wrote: »

I just bought a laptop and it is in windows 8, do you think I should put an antivirus or not?

Definitely

k18dan

Great information - However why would you spend hours and hours doing all these steps.

A uninstall and re-install of the OS is a much better idea in my view