The Inevitable Windows Slow Down

So my mum brought her laptop over last night and asked if I can do anything about the fact it runs noticably slower than it did when she got it. It's a low end Toshiba running Vista Home Premium.

When she got it I went through and uninstalled most of the OEM-ed crap that came on it and it ran fine. While there are a few extra things installed now there's not enough to account for the impact.

My feeling is that rather than it being a specific issue this is the inevitable Windows performance degredation over time.

I've used Windows in one form or another since 3.1 but have never really understood why this is or how to prevent or treat it.

Can anyone tell me why it happens and, critically, whether there is anything (short of a full reinstall) I can do about it - either preventative or a cure?

(And I've tried selling her on another OS but she's 65 and for now wants to stick with what she knows, particularly when she's only had 9 months use out of a machine).

Solution 1:

Not an explanation of why this slowdown happens, but you might be interested in Raxco's PerfectDisk (it is payware, but there's a 30-day free trial available). It's a 3rd party defragging tool, but it goes the additional step of re-ordering your files on disk according to how frequently they're accessed.

This worked wonders for my aging XP desktop, quite tangibly increasing responsiveness on initial boot and when launching applications. The most obvious changes was that previously on boot I'd arrive at the XP Welcome screen, only to have to wait between 10 and 30 seconds before the login prompt became available. Afterwards that wait was down to 1 or 2 seconds.

The tool has other bells and whistles (scheduling etc.), but I recommend it to friends and family based purely on the SmartPlacement stuff. IMHO its worth using the trial version to do a full SmartPlacement pass, even if you never use it again!

Solution 2:

In my experience, this is caused by the users having installed lots of software, as mentioned by Avery Payne and John T. OTOH disk fragmentation accounts for only a small part of the slow down. I have come up with this approach:

Whenever someone in my family buys a new computer, I spend one or two hours doing what you did: deleting all the unnecessary crap. I clean up everything that I can find, install the latest service packs and security updates for Windows, Office etc, and I move the My Documents folder to a seperate drive. *)

Then I install an old version of Acronis TrueImage that came for free with a computer magazine some years ago. (I think it's version 7, it came with a license to use for free for personal uses, as many installations as I wanted, so i am legally in the clear here ;-) I take an image of the whole system drive and store it on the drive with the user documents.

Every now and then, my mom, dad, sister, cousin or whatever will complain that their computers are getting slooooooow... I tell them that I can restore the old image, but they will have to reinstall all other programs they installed after I took the image.

So far, everyone has acceptesd this. I restore the old image, and they have to spend an additional hour or two reinstalling all their pet programs (thus starting to make the system slow again ;-)

**) yes yes, I know... better to store the image on a seperate physical drive than on another partition, but hey - you have to balance benefit against effort*