PC running slowly

closed

look ok......

LittleJo

Hi,
My HD is 500GB and in 4 years i have filled up 65GB.
If I buy a 160GB external HD, this should leave plenty of room.
Hopefully Macrium only images the used portion.
If I do this, image my HD, and when it gets slow again boot from it , I will be sorted!
I would still need to back up anything I changed, XP, word docs etc.
Make a note of anything i added I need,
Also if I had a PC crash, I could buy a new PC and reload from my external HD.
Have I understood it right?
Jo

closed

create a macrium image (not clone) of your internal drive including all partitions when you get the hard disk, and do it periodically again, every 3-6 months or as often as you want, then you will have half a dozen .img backups on the external drive to choose from if something goes wrong.

most drives are bigger than that nowadays, a 500GB portable (ie small and no external power needed) costs around £35-40 and would give you room to expand or store more than one backup, there may be other partitions on the drive too, which it's useful to backup.

http://www.ebuyer.com/search?sort=price+ascending&subcat=3267&cat=393&page=1

if you are careful what you install, particularly anything that installed startup items, toolbars, then it shouldn't go slow. when installing anything, watchout for the optional tick boxes that bundle bloat. If it does get slow, then yes, you can restore it exactly as it is today, or whenever you did the backup with macrium free.

if you had a hard disk crash or any kind of hard disk or software problem, then you would boot from the macrium cd (make sure you create one from the macrium menu), and restore from latest backup ( to a new hard disk if it has completely failed). restoring the os to different hardware is a different matter, you'd be better off sticking with the new os, and browsing through the img backup to pick out your data - it's a good idea to backup anything really important to a dvd or two as well - ie keep the master on the internal drive, 1 or more backups on external drives, and one copy of just data on dvd

Ruok2bu

Do a defrag of your hard drive too. It's the most overlooked thing and it can increase speed drastically. Do a defrag at least once a month from now on too.

P.S. Defragging also helps your hard drive last longer because the read heads have to do less movement when the hard drive is not fragmented.

P.S.S. If your hard drive is an SSD drive, DO NOT DEFRAG IT! SSD drives dont need to be defragged because there's no mechanical parts. Defragging a SSD drive simply reduces the lifespan of the drive.

closed

defrag is the first thing most people do, and won't make the slightest difference on 99.99% of machines.

Ruok2bu

Back before i knew about defrag, the first time i did it, it took around 9 hours for the defrag to fix the hard drive and everything responded 3 times faster after that.