Maintaining Windows XP System Performance?

jerud wonders: "I assume that most people on Slashdot are forced to, at some point, touch Windows. Further, I assume that many of them are forced to administer Windows boxes. I am in the unfortunate situation of using Windows for about 90% of my tasks, due to the nature of my job. As a firm believer in 'if it isn't broke don't fix it', I've delayed moving to XP for just about as long as possible, holding onto my Windows 2000 installation, while my brother spent a lot of time complaining about the XP issues he dealt with, at work. Finally, I made the transition and, low and behold, it didn't seem to bad. In fact, there were a few things that I really liked. Now, a few years later I have quite a few XP machines and they all share the same problem: over time they have slowed so noticeably that they have made even the most solid configurations run like they were made in 1999. Is there any regular treatment out there that can minimize this kind of system degradation?" "Solid practices are in use on most of these machines, or at least the ones that are completely under my control. Even with that, I know these machines are much slower now then when I bought them. I really don't want to spend two weekends every year starting over from scratch, simply because thats the only way to reclaim performance."

Comments

I have the same feeling

[OzPeter]

My Dell laptop seemed full of crud. I know that I had installed quite a few systems just to test them over the first year that I had the laptop. And now it was showing mysterious symptoms - Programs would seem to just hang when I started them. The responsiveness seemed down.

So I wiped the hardrive and re-installed XP plus all the packages that I knew I needed. After I got it all running again, it seemed as repsonsive as when I first got it.

But that was 10 months ago. Now it is back to the same feeling of molasses at times with the inexplicable behaviour. So obviously I have installed something that has slowed things down. But what? There is no way to tell what it is. So it looks like I am headed for the yearly rebuild again.

[Note 1 that in all of this, I have been using virus protection, adware protection, software firewalls, and up-todate patches]

[Note 2 To all you people who will say wipe XP and put *nix on. I can't as I have custom software development tools that *only* run on windows. And no, it is not possible to rewrite them from scratch - and anybody who thinks so hasn't been out in the world of PLC programming and heavy industries]

Re:I have the same feeling

[tommertron]

[Note 1 that in all of this, I have been using virus protection, adware protection, software firewalls, and up-todate patches] Virus protection and adware protection constantly running in the background? Those are almost always performance drains. Especially if they're set to scan every file change, addition, install, email, and download. Maybe I'm lucky, but I haven't ever used a virus protection program on my computer (3+ years now), and I've been fine. I also don't download apps from P2Ps, I use Firefox, and my email is all webmail, where I never open attachments I don't trust.

Run as a Non-admin User

[tgbrittai]

This is the best way, by far! It's more secure and stops almost all spyware cold. And no spyware == better performance.

You probably won't hear this elsewhere...

[hackwrench]

I run with system restore turned off. Also clearing out your logs Control Panel|Administrative Tools|Event Viewer may or may not make a difference. You may actually try reading some of them first, but good luck making sense of them.

Example Log Entry:
The description for Event ID ( 20158 ) in Source ( RemoteAccess ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details

clean the crap out

[xiong.chiamiov]

As well as everything suggested above, run Crap Cleaner. This has cleaned so many gigs of junk from my computer over time, I don't know what I would do without it.

Keep it clean, Keep it safe

[CosmicDreams]

At work these two steps usually do the trick.

1. Run CCleaner. Both to find useless files AND to weed out unneeded registry entries.

2. Run Microsoft's Antispyware program.

Additionally you can run MS's antispyware program to look for unwanted apps that start at runtime.

As others have mentioned shutting down extra services you don't need may be a good idea. But in my experience those services don't effect a computer nearly as much as runaway Hard drive consumption by IE and unchecked spyware.

Windows(TM) Auto-Fragmenter(TM)

[Richard Dick Head]

Anyway, Windows XP tries to defrag your HD when it is idle, which could be bad. I know my work laptop, now running XP, suffered a lot more fragmentation after the upgrade from 2000 (before I turned auto defrag off). I think it has to do with the fact that either I'm working on my laptop, or its off. There is some accidental idle time in there, but only enough time to fragment the HD even worse before I resume my work. So, I turned it off, and it seems to be fragmenting normally now.

So, YMMV, I've done no quantitative analysis on this, it may be due to changing usage patterns, but if your users keep their computers busy, turning off auto defrag could help. It certainly won't make it worse then you had before the upgrade, since you're back at Windows 2000 behavior.

Another thing I thought of, but haven't tried, is set the registry size limit to something low like 1 MB, possibly cutting down on all the crud in there. I'd do it myself, but my laptop is too important to risk downtime, and the rest of my machines don't have registries.

The only effective way....

[Raisputin]

The only effective way that I have found to keep a Windows box running even halfway decently is install Windows (we'll assume XP for right now), immediately perform all Windows Updates, both Critical and optional and any driver updates, then install:

1. Ad-Aware SE
2. Spybot Search & Destroy
3. SpywareBlaster
4. Microsoft Anti-Spyware
5. Some Anti-Virus Program that you like (at my work, we install Norton even though it is a resource hog, but never Norton Internet Security since it eventually always fucks a computer up)

Set your Anti-virus program to scan at least weekly, and automatically update itself, Update and sca with Ad-Aware and Spybot weekly at a minimum, and update and protect with SpywareBlaster weekly at a minimum.

It is absolutely ridiculous that a person should have to do this to keep their computer running decently. We get so many Windows machines in the shop that it isn't even funny, but thusfar, whenever we have managed to convince someone to upgrade to a MacOS X machine (Typically when their Dell, Compaq, HP, E-Machines has a motherboard failure). They have came back completely excited and astonished that they don't really have to worry about spyware and viruses so much.

My reccomendation on keeping your WIndows XP machine in top performance. Go buy a high-end Mac and run VirtualPC if it can run whatever program you NEED to run (Note: Games do not count), if you cannot run your Prorgram under VPC, buy a low-end PC and keep it off the network.

Keeping an XP install going

[Ogun]

Regularely doing these things:

Running "sfc /purgecache" to empty the system file checker cache.
Emptying the folder "C:\windows\prefetch" to clean the prefecth buffer.
Defragging.
And the usual things like removing spyware etc.