I second this advice. You can reinstall Spybot if you want to later as long as you are carefull to un-check TeaTimer. It is a big resource suck, just run Spybot manually once in awhile and do not add TeaTimer.
I’ll bet you see a big difference right away.
Type ‘teatimer’ into Google and the fifth suggestion offered to complete your search is “teatimer slows down computer”. Read a few links and you will be convinced to dump it.
OK, I got rid of Spybot and Teatimer and yes, everything is much faster now, including big image files. What kind of vile pig-men would design such an insidious program? What possible benefit could such a resource-hogging contrivance have?
Do you think I would still benefit from more RAM or a larger hard drive? Keep in mind, although I only have less than 2 gigs of space on the primary drive, I do have another, larger secondary HD and additionally a 1TB external drive.
wouldn’t hurt. my philosophy is RAM is so cheap these days that you might as well stuff as much in as the system can take (or what you can reasonably afford.)
yes. Windows does not like it when the system drive runs out of space.
So just move as much as you can from your C drive onto your secondary hard drive. There is not much else besides Windows itself that actually needs to be on the C drive, although some programs may need to be uninstalled from C and reinstalled on your secondary drive. All your data can quite happily live on your secondary drive, or even your external one.
When you have cleared as much as you can from the C drive, I would suggest that you defrag it to make sure there is a nice clear area of space for the Windows page file. If you do get more RAM it will need more space for its pagefile anyway (although it won’t need to use it so often), but I am inclined to agree with ftg: with what you are doing (unless you are photoshopping very large, hi-res images, or lots of them at once), you probably do not really need more RAM.
Add up the RAM usage of all of the programs that you commonly use (you can see how much they are using in the task manager). If the total is less than about 2 gigs (roughly the physical RAM in your system), then additional RAM isn’t going to help you at all. You need to check it when the programs are somewhere near their peak memory usage, i.e. photoshop running with as many different pictures and largest images you ever use. Firefox and windows photo viewer don’t need much RAM.
Freeing up space on your C drive by moving files to the second drive will help. If the second drive is faster and it is permanently installed, you can try moving the windows swap file over to it. If the second drive is slower though you can end up slowing down your system a bit.
Listen to the guys who are telling you to move as much as you can off your C: drive. Windows needs around 20% or so of the drive free to operate efficiently – yours is under 10%.
Please provide evidence for this statement.
It’s just not true at all, assuming you have enough space for the paging file (which you can reduce or remove all together if you have sufficient RAM).
If the OP does want to have more space on his drive and move programs to what is (hopefully) a faster secondary drive I would suggest using symbolic links:
http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardlinkshellext.html
Through Link Shell extension.
Here’s what you do (after installing the above program):
go into the programs folder and find the program you want to move to your secondary drive. Make sure you are not running that program currently.
Cut and paste the folder into your secondary drive.
Right click the folder in the secondary drive and choose “pick as source…”.
Go back to the programs folder and right click then choose “drop as…” -> “Symbolic link”.
To the OS it looks like the shortcut you created is actually part of the primary drive, even though really the folder exists elsewhere.
(Slight hijack) Can I move my page file to a USB drive?
This is the main problem, but there are a few other steps to take along with getting Win7:
1: Clean out all the dust in your PC (I know there’s a lot in there, don’t lie to me, won’t help all that much, but I like it clean to see what’s what :))
2: If the the parts are all fairly new (which they’re not cause your running XP) then you can move to the next step. If they’re not new, you may be experiencing an overheated CPU, the thermal paste on the processor could be dried and cracked, or the thing is just merely a dinosaur and needs to be in the museum. If so, get a new MB (motherboard) too while your at it (easy to install yourself). If you really watch where and what your buying you can rebuild your whole computer with 200/400 bucks give or take and depending on how much you want to spend and how fast you want to go :D. Putting parts in is super easy, just as long as you throw the manual away as soon as you see it, it will scare and confuse you, it’s designed to actually, so do not read it! Everything you need to know is online but those guys will scare you too most of the time, just not as much as the manuals.
3: RAM, your processor is only as good as your memory (that should be a famous qoute :D). depending on wether you replaced the MB and CPU, then you need to know whether it’s DDR2 or DDR3 that the MB takes and make sure you’ve got plenty of it.
4: Make sure all of the connections to the hard drive(s) and DVD/CDROM drive(s) are SATA, I cannot stress this enough (mostly 'cause I’m on a rampage to destroy all IDE cables), your HD needs to be SATA, seriously.
5: Congratulations, you’ve made it to the most important step IMO…Install Win7…why you ask…because XP is now just one giant band aid, it’s the main problem, the OS is just a shell of its former self, all the downloads, updates and patches have turned it into a mummy, and your PC is struggling to run it just by itself. Oh, and if you do change the MB and CPU and get a 64 bit make sure you install a 64 bit version of Windows to use all the capabilities (32 bit will work, but it’d be a tragic crime to do that). BTW, if the MB has changed, you will need to buy another copy of Windows anyway…Bill Gates is a stinker like that, unless you want to go Linux (not recommended if you don’t want to spend the rest of your life figuring out how it works :D).
how much free hard drive space is needed for Xp to run efficiently?
how much hard disk space should I left free for smooth operations if I had a hard disk of 40GB.
You can run down plenty more if you like. This is just one of those things we old geezers who used to deal with 10MB (yes, MB) hard drives used to have to work around. Windows needs free space to operate efficiently – modern hard drives rarely run into this problem but the OP is running a very small drive by today’s standards.
Windows needs about 600 MB for XP, and maybe 1 GB or so for Windows 7 (not sure about Vista - it does some weird things which makes it a resource hog). Windows also needs about double your physical RAM for its page file, so if you have 2 GB of memory you need an extra 4 GB on top of that.
After that, it depends on your applications and what size temporary files they create. A fairly lightly loaded system like the OP doesn’t need much more than that to run efficiently, and with larger disk sizes it certainly doesn’t work out to a large percentage of the drive. If you have 5 GB free on a 1 TB drive that is significantly less than 20% (or even 10%) free, but XP will be quite happy with it.
I don’t think Windows will let you put the pagefile on a removable disk. If you removed the disk, very bad things would happen to the OS.
While I am sure that Bill Gates and all of the hardware manufactures would love your recommendation, there is absolutely nothing wrong with running XP. You are asking the OP to shell out quite a bit of money and go through a lot of hassle for something that is of little benefit given the list of software used on that machine.
The linux recommendation is even worse. There is no linux version of photoshop so at the very least the OP would have to learn an entirely new software package. And if GIMP doesn’t do everything that the OP wants then they lose functionality on top of everything else.
XP is fine for a machine of that era. The OP needs his software cleaned up so that he gets his performance back where it needs to be. He doesn’t need a new PC. (Whether or not he wants a new PC is up to him, though)
I run Windows XP and have no performance problems whatsoever. Genuinely baffled by that.
I am not talking about how much space it takes to install XP, I am talking about how much room XP needs to operate efficiently. The OP is doing video editing of large files on a 30GB drive with only 1.7GB free. That drive is so overloaded it probably won’t even try to run Defrag.
All talk of modern large hard drives does not apply here – look at his numbers. He needs to move a bunch of stuff off that drive.
Never recommended Linux, I said it would be a a ‘rest of your life’ kinda’ thing to do so, NOT recommended.
Yeah, everyboby says :rolleyes: ‘XP’s just fine’ :rolleyes: (sarcastic voice). Then explain to me why, once I bit the bullet and just did everything I mentioned above, that my PC runs like a dream (floating on soft puffy clouds). People think PC’s are like cars, they say things like: “well I just got a computer 3 yrs ago, it should be fine!” :rolleyes: :smack:…:smack::smack:. I’m not asking the OP to do anything, the question was asked, and I answered, whether the advice is taken or not, I could care less, but when the OP is finally tired of struggling and fighting the machine, the advice stands true and will never go away. You software guys love to fight the issue I know, you’ll spend countless hours tinkering and trying to make your sh*t do something it’s just too old to do. Well, time is $$$ too, and by the time you’ve fought it, you could have just taken the easy way out, and will have to eventually FYI…and it’s a lot cheaper IMO.
Because, when you upgraded, you formatted and reinstalled the OS. Reinstalling Windows XP would have worked just as well. Windows 7 is a wonderful, wonderful piece of software, but, especially on older machines, it’s usually slightly slower than Windows XP.
Touche, Silophant, another way to keep your PC running smoothly, though, is to not download or do anything stupid, and buy some good virus protection :). Use your computer wisely and have a backup PC for anything stupid you know your about to do. I like to keep an old husk around, fix it up over time, and have something to beat on and abuse :).
Why? XP is a great OS and any machine sold in the last, oh, 7 years would have more than enough speed and space to run it. Problems only came when people put it on older machines, which is the same problem we see with Windows 7 and probably the same problem we saw going from '95 to '98.
OS’s don’t “degrade” like a mechanical appliance might. There’s nothing to wear out or get slower. What happens is that people keep installing more and more crap on it without cleaning things up. People don’t clear caches or history or anything. Then they install programs that require more “oomph” than their system has and those programs run slow. That’s not an OS problem that’s a hardware problem.
A tidy copy of Windows XP will run on the specs given. Photoshop and Firefox…ymmv.
the other problem with XP is that it’s only worthwhile in 32-bit form, and thus you’re forever limited to ~3.25 GB of usable RAM.
I already have several new, genuine Windows 7 installation CDs that have been sitting in a drawer. But I am not about to install that OS on this computer. I don’t like it. I used XP for years on this machine, ever since it was released, and liked it. I have a much newer laptop running 7, but I use this desktop machine far more often.