My sister keeps telling me that when the computer gets slow, it’s because we have too much stuff on the hard drive. I try to tell her memory is different, but she refuses to listen.
I know that after a long time with the computer on, it will start to leech off of the hard drive, but I doubt that’s the case. (We have an 11 gig C drive with almost three gigs left, and in addition, we have a second hard drive, the D drive, which is the same size and only has a quarter of it filled up.)
It’s not so much how much is on the drive, it’s more how it’s arranged. When files grow, they usually don;t grow in place, so that new bits are placed in differents spots of the drive. The more places your computer has to look for all the bits, the longer it takes to perform a function. That’s why you defrag your drive from time to time.
Along will come an expert who can clarify and/or correct me.
Your sister might be right in some instances, but not this one.
Most modern operating systems use a pagefile – a portion of the hard drive is used to supplement the main memory (RAM). This is also referred to as virtual memory, and it generally contributes quite a bit to overall performance. If there isn’t enough room on the disk to create the pagefile then your system will get noticably slower. This usually only happens if you are down to your last few hundred megs of space. 3 GB is plenty.
Your sister might have a point in the following cases…
What OS are you using ?
Windows does use the hard disk as a kind of secondary memory when your physical RAM gets used up. The paging file is an area on the hard disk that Windows uses as if it were RAM. The amount of hard disk space usually used by the paging file is upto about twice your physical RAM. Seeing that you have 3GB free on your primary hard disk, the rest of the data on the hard disk won’t affect your speed.
After a lot of installations, uninstallations, deleting and creating of files, the drive tends to get fragmented. Defragmenting the drives will improve performance.
So while, in general, the space used on the hard drive does not affect computer speed, there are specific cases where it might.
The clutter on your desktop does not affect your computer’s speed. The number of icons in the Quick Launch toolbar does not affect your computer’s speed. This is something that non-computer people cannot seem to fathom, no matter how many times you tell them. The icons in your system tray do affect computer performance, because these are loaded into memory.
It is much more likely that the performance of your comp is affected by unnecessary items loaded at start up.
Defragging once a month is plenty. Clearing the history probably won’t make any difference. Deleting the Temporary Internet Files may help a little with web browsing, particularly if they haven’t been cleared out in a while.
However, as xash said, the most likely cause of system slowness is having too many things loading at startup. Go to Start|Run, type msconfig, and go to the Startup tab. Uncheck any items which aren’t absolutely essential, then reboot. If this causes any problems, simply check the items again.
Also, doesn’t ME have a pretty bad memory leak? If you don’t restart every couple of days the RAM starts to get used up and Windows doesn’t clean it out. One option is to just restart the computer in the morning every other morning or something like that. Or you can download a program like Rambooster and run it every so often. This should help.
Are you sure? In order for Quick Launch to function as intended, program icons in Quick Launch are effectively operating programs sitting “at idle” until you need them. You can still launch a program from the desktop icons and/or Start menu.
Kill your Quick Launch icons to retrieve some taskbar real estate, gain a minute amount of computer “speed,” and reduce overall clutter.
Unless Quick Launch in Windows ME operates radically different from 2000/XP, the icons in it are just regular shortcuts to programs. They don’t represent ‘idling’ programs but just a one-click way to start them.
Quick Launch is the name of the row of icons on the bottom left in Win98+. It’s just another place to add icons.
The System Tray on the right represents programs that typically run in the background. They usually don’t use that much CPU, but can use lots of RAM. IMHO, most are dumb. I want my programs to use CPU and ram on load, not all the time so they can fake loading faster.
IIRC, the windows swap file is created on a contiguous section of disk, and is non-relocatable (and thus mostly immune to fragmentation). Running programs will have problems with their own files though, slowing them down a bit.
So really, unless your working drive is massively fragmented, how much disk is used is irrelevent. You could have a multi-terrabyte array tacked on to your box, and the only performance hit would be the negligable amount the SCSI RAID driver used.
<em>Actually</em> they do. Since Windows 3.x days, there are two system resource files called USER and GDI that are both 64K in size. Icons and other stuff eat into these resources, and when they drop below 50% you will have problems.
Yes, I’m sure. Icons on the Quick Launch toolbars are not loaded into memory and sitting at idle. They are merely shortcuts to frequently used programs.
You can tell this by pulling up the Task Manager, and looking at the list of active Processes. I have 28 Quick Launch icons, and the only ones that appear in the Process list are running either in my Taskbar or my System Tray. (This is Win2K; I imagine other Windowses have similar things.)
These resources are used by open browser windows, multimedia applications, system monitoring utilities, active desktop, animated mouse cursors/desktop icons, sound schemes, multiple open applications, etc.
What might be confusing the issue, though, is you’re possibly hitting the limit of the physical RAM you have in your machine, causing the OS to perform more swapping of RAM pages to and from the hard drive. This situation typically causes a massive dropoff in user interface responsiveness, as well as causing the disk to seemingly “grind” as it tries to keep up with memory requests as the system switches through tasks.
So she might be assuming that the disk is full because of the drive swapping/grinding.
Also make sure the recycle bin is empty. I forgot to empty it for a while once, and my computer slowed right down when doing anything disk intensive. I found out it was because the hard drive was full, and windows had to delete some file in the recycle bin to make room for new files which slowed everything down.
Jesus Pete, please tell me that people aren’t so lazy that they can’t even be bothered to turn a computer off for the night. It only takes a few seconds to shutdown and the same again in the morning.
Turn the bloody things off. It won’t hurt you or the computer, and it will save you some money on your elextric bill.
These are not files. Windows in earlier versions had issues with memory management (in part due to the 80X86 processor architecture) that made it simpler to restrict the amount of memory available for the storage of certain variables to a measely 64 KByte.
Please refrain from providing misleading, uninformative answers.
