I googled “speeding up computer” and “slow computer” because my desktop is running slow–agonizingly slow. More than one place advocates registry cleaners. But here’s the thing: they also say to keep the computer functioning well, don’t download anything from a site you are not 100% sure is benign.
Example here
It’s almost a paradox. Click here, use this, and then don’t download anything else ever from some site you’re not sure of. But how can I be sure of this site?
You don’t pick a random site that has a tool you want and then find out if you can trust it. You pick a site you can trust, and then find out if it has the tool you want.
Technically, you can’t. Any website can be compromised by a determined attacker, or be a front for some scheme. However, at this point, we leave the practical world and enter into the theoretical world.
You have to make up your mind to trust SOME source–otherwise you’ll go through life a paranoid wreck.
As far as downloads go, cnet.com is a highly-trusted source. PCWorld.com is also a good source for reviews and so forth.
Most of those things I have come across are crapware.
Stay away from registry cleaners as a rule of thumb. They are often not careful enough and cause issues on down the road.
registry cleaners are bunk. if your computer is running slowly, you’ve either got too much crap running, are running out of memory, or are running out of hard drive space.
Why not just read the second sticky at the top of the General Questions forum on how to clean your computer and keep it safe from Malware? 
It’s best explained with an analogy. Security contractors (to assess and reduce a companies vulnerability to burglary, vandalism and the like) need full access to a companies properties and some rather sensitive information to do their job.
Since this type of access is very easily abused, most businesses only hire contractors with a good reputation (or, ideally, a referral from) people that company knows and trusts.
Like the Straight Dope Administrators.
Which strangely enough the OP has looked at. 
I ran into bad trouble following those instructions.
In fact, the computer slowed way way down when I was using the Microsoft Essentials, and I had to get rid of that. Which helped somewhat.
I’ve cleaned it off to the point the hard disk is 25% free (it was almost full; I realize that was a problem).
Your registry isn’t memory-resident, so cleaning it up isn’t going to help too much except maybe on startup, when the OS doesn’t have to look for configuration info in such a big file.
I’d take a look at what services you load (run “msconfig” and take a look). Freeing up disk space is a good idea; if you’re running short on your swap file drive that could account for your sudden slowdowns. So could some malware that’s eating memory.
Something’s either eating processor time or eating memory and making your system incur a lot of overhead trying to switch back and forth.
the registry is not a single file, and some parts of it aren’t even files at all.
Most software claiming to speed up your computer does exactly the opposite – clog it up and slow it down and want money for that.
Trust me, I’ve seen PageDefrag enough to know that it’s not one big file.
Nonetheless, those individual files can get fragmented and bloated, and that just slows down startup somewhat, not that I’m actively campaigning for a registry cleaner. PageDefrag does a lot more good overall by just putting all the file blocks together contiguously
I have a Mac. I see the Mac Keeper ads everywhere. They are as annoying if not more than the “____hates this” ads. There is no way I would ever trust something that intrusive.
The first thing is to make sure your hard drive has at least 15% space available. If not, find stuff to delete. I use Scanner to make it easy to find where the space is being used up using a nice simple graphical interface.
If that doesn’t do the trick, the best way to breathe new life into an old computer is to maximize its memory, if it isn’t already. Ssoftware keeps getting bigger, but your computer’s memory doesn’t. When it runs out, it caches memory to disk and back as it’s needed (“swapping”, “virtual memory”). When there’s a little of this it’s fine, but when there’s a lot of it, it’s terrible (and called “thrashing”). When a computer that once seemed reasonably fast becomes maddeningly slow, this is often the cause.
Get a neighborhood nerd to help you find out how much memory your computer can handle and how to buy new memory for it. Bake cookies or provide a 6-pack. This is less than a one 6-pack problem, usually. The answer may be “Sorry, you’re already maxxed out.” Still worth the 6-pack. Installing the memory when it arrives is also an easy one-6-pack fix, assuming most of the beer is consumed after the installation.
Another thing that can really help is re-installing Windows. This used to be true for Macs too, but I’m way out of date on Macs and it may no longer be the case. Reinstalling Windows solves a number of problems:
It’s a bit of a pain in the rear, of course, and you need a place to store the files you want to keep during the reinstall. (I recommend an external hard drive, for this and archival purposes … or cloud storage, though that will be a LOT slower but it protects you from loss through fire, crime, or hardware failures.) External hard drives are cheap, and when it’s time to upgrade one you can usually keep the cage and replace the drive itself for considerably less cost.
More stuff.
Okay, I have windows XP running on a dell optiplex gx280, if that means anything.
When I first got it and would check the task manager, there would be 29-32 processes running, and that would include any applications I was using at the time, and I could use a lot of them simultaneously (e.g. Word, InDesign, Excel).
Now I pretty much start out with 58 or 59 processes before I even launch an application. If I want to work in InDesign I have to close everything else. I can just barely run InDesign and PhotoShop at the same time. I am really prone to locking up.
I made a list of all the processes and it seems to me I have way, way too many things that call themselves “svhost.exe” and they are eating way too much memory.
Is there any way this list might help me figure out what to get rid of/what’s going on?
Assuming you mean “svchost”, those are container processes for Windows Services (i.e. background processes of various sorts). The number can vary based on various things, but having several of them isn’t necessarily a sign of anything wrong. And memory reporting on Windows is very complicated; it’s easy for things to look like they’re using a lot of memory when it’s just sitting permenantly paged out, for example.
If you type “msconf” into the run box of your start menu (might be “msconfig” – I don’t have an XP box in front of me at the moment, and Win8 does it differently), you’ll get a tabbed dialog that will let you selectively turn on and off services and other stuff that runs at startup. You can use this to determine what you need and what you don’t.
But as others have said: by the time you’re getting so constrained you can’t do simple program runs on a clean boot, it’s time to re-install. Nothing else is likely to give you as good of results as simply.
svchost.exe is a host, for services. You can arrange it so that each service has it’s own copy of svchost. or so that all services use only one copy of svchost, but normally it’s somewhere in between those two extremes.
But yes, you probably have too many things running, and you probably don’t want some of them.
One place to start would be with Process Explorer. See this blog for an example:http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-9865052-12.html
It’s also possible to track it down using Task Manager to show the PID column, then Netsh to show PID information.
My mom was complaining about her netbook getting slower and slower, so I promised to look into it for her. Once I defragged the hard drive and emptied the temporary internet files (she said “what are those?” when I mentioned it, so 2.5 years worth of temp files is going to make things pretty damn slow!) it started running a hell of a lot faster.
So…are you preforming clean up activities regularly? You don’t need to download anything for the necessary tools if you have windows (I mean, you can, but you don’t need to); defrag is part of the system tools and you empty temp files with your browser’s internet tools.
Sometimes a computer will become slower over time and there’s nothing you can do about it.
I have an old 2004 era Celeron computer. When I got it, it would run fine, play videos on Youtube, load webpages fast, etc.
Nowadays it runs like a dog and there’s nothing wrong with the computer, it’s the software. The latest versions of Acrobat, Firefox, Flash, AVG antivirus, etc. are designed with newer computers in mind and are lot more resource hungry compared to the 2004 versions.
Also websites now use javascript more and the latest CSS and HTML effects will bring an old computer down to its knees.