I don't know about y'all but I have a need for speed when it comes to my computer. We currently have three computers in the house. One, my husband's lap top, is about 6 years old and was refurbished when he got it. I no touchy touchy that one its so slow I would drop kick it in about 2 seconds and he would lose all his geeky science documents. Another is my teeny tiny netbook. Its great for Facebook, email, and can handle my 4 and 8 gig SD cards. This brings me to the third and final pain in my a$$: An HP Pavilion desktop from...2005? 6? Mom?? My parents gave me this computer and don't get me wrong, I am SO grateful to have a large computer to work with my photos.
HOWEVER!
It came with some baggage and I just never got around to unloading.
First, I have XP Home Edition. I don't know if other OS will fit into this but THAT'S WHAT GOOGLE IS FOR!!
Here are the issues I was facing:
1) It started up fast SEEMINGLY (I do believe that is a real word!) but then the hard drive would be chuttering away (totally not a real word) for a good 5 minutes after and it could only handle one process at a time. That means that if I'm editing in Lightroom I can't be surfing the web or even use Picasa (secondary editing program). The Task Master would not show any other program running that was eating up the usage so I could not figure out what the heck.
2) Every time I have tried to download any programs I am unable to save the programs to the C:\Program Files folder. Access Denied EVERY TIME. I mean, come ON!!! I am an "Administrator" and all so I should be in God Mode, right???
3) C: drive disk space was very limited. I knew this and just was too lazy to do anything about it!
Here is the morphine that took away my online pain:
1) I went to Start>Run and typed in msconfig and then clicked on the toggled for Selective Startup. Next I went to the Startup tab at the top. Now, there were about 30 different things that were running at startup in here! No wonder all that chuttering was aflutter!
Here's the thing though--you don't want to just start willy nilly unchecking crap! Your computer DOES need some of it. What I did before I touched ANY of them was go to Bleeping Computer and clicked on their tab that says Startup. In here is a search box. The best thing to do is write a list of all the startup items in the msconfig box on a piece of paper, and then search one by one on Bleeping Computer's site and it will tell you which ones to keep, which to uncheck, and which you need to make a decision about based on your needs. In my case, I do not own a printer so I unchecked all the HP printer driver stuff. Once you have whittled the checked stuff down and are satisfied, click on Apply and then close it out. You must restart your computer to see the changes...a good idea anyway.
2) For the program files issue it was a little more complicated HA! What I basically learned how to do is change ownership on a folder. Didn't know such a thing existed! There is a great article that I followed in the Microsoft Support forum for this task. It seemed to work...guess I'll find out next time I download King's Quest IV!!
3) I then went into my Control Panel>Add/Remove programs and ditched every single DVD movie maker, Scanner, WebCam, and Flight Simulator I could find, and also some programs that I would never, ever use. I only use this computer for photos and surfing the web and I only use 3 programs just about EVER.
After restarting yet again the computer now starts up with almost no grinding noises and I can run Lightroom AND Chrome at the same time, AND a bonus is that Lightroom is loading and exporting almost twice as fast as before which should cut down on the long hours I spend working on photos that most people will never see! Crap there goes my Me Time!!
I hope this was useful in some way...I also recommend Analyzing your C: drive (or whatever your main drive is) in the Defrag application. If you don't know where that is it is under Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools Defragging can make a huge difference especially if you are adding and deleting files often like I do.
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