I bought a new dell about 4 or 5 months ago and i formated it and installed xp and everything. It basicalyy ran really good, no real speed issues but lately its become a pain in the ass. Ive done everything i could think of to speed it up I deleted and uninstalled a lot of programs and files, I ran virus and and adware scans, I use firefox to avoid viruses and adware, i cleaned out the regestry the only thing i havent done is reformated and I really dont want to becuase its such a pain to backup all my files,music, movies etc.. So does anyone know a way to speed this thing backup?

edit: and I just realized that I havent defreggmented Im going to try that later tonight.

If there are no speed issues, how is it becoming a pain in hte ass?

Try a system restore to the last time it wasn't a pain, and it should IIRC keep all your files.

he said there are speed issues lately, there weren't any when he first bought it


Any way Just reformat and install all that virus/spyware shit before u start going around downloading stuff and visiting websites. If you want 100% fix just start from scratch that's been my expierence

****DOUBLE******

Ok first of all, its not reformating. Its a simple format.

Go to you start menu, and hit run, then type in msconfig, select "selective startup" then hit the selective tab and disable them all. Then restart and it should load alot faster and run better.

however if he does that then most of his shit won't work, so just disable the ones that you don't know

No, all of his progams will still work. Disable everything.

all that does is keep them from loading at startup, everything still works fine.

bored of this site? want a change of scenery? or do you just feel like this forum isn't giving you what you need? GO TO HTTP://GAIAEVOLED.COM for an awesome community, anime and manga, fanart fanfics, xbox, ps2, general gaming, PC, chit-chat, everything you could wish for, it's fun and you will so many more friends CHECK IT OUT MAN!

Thanks Ill try that and if its still running slow I guess ill just format and start over

Edit:And would someone ban trigunner please

Nah no need to format. Just delete anything you dont want or need. Anyprogram you dont know what it is, delete it. More than likely its spyware. Defrag your computer, do the msconfig, then maybe it will all be back to normal, well it should anyway. Also idk if Im just lucky or what... but Ive not use a antivirus program in over 4 years and havent had a problem yet. Maybe its just I know what to install and how to keep stuff from being installed, and Im sure I have a virus or trojan or something on here, but nothing thats causeing me any problems. Just disable it and scan once a month or something like that. Or take it completely off, that works too.

Yeah thats what I do with my virus scaner (I use AntiVir xp) and I know all about spyware/adware Im experienced with computers and im sure thats wasnt the problem. I use a few scanners and i keep my hdd pretty organized but every computer Ive had has always eventually slowed down to the point where I just get sick of trying to figure out whats slowing it down so much and format and install windows fresh.
When I first got it up and running I could have 3 or 4 pages in mozilla open have mp3s playing in winamp and browse through folders all at the same time and almost without a stutter or slowdown but lately I couldnt play winamp if I ran anything else becuase it stuttered to much (yes I tried numerous media players) folders took much longer to open and when I opened 2 pages in mozilla it slowed down alot. I didnt have any other programs running in the backround and It still ran like shit. I ran system restore to about a month ago and cleaned everything up and ran defrag so now its running pretty good but I think it couldnt hurt to bhuy some more ram though since Ive only got 512 megs.
Thanks again for the help though

you need tune-up utilities 2004 and that will help out alot with cleaning out the registry and the hard drive with all that unwanted crap. It also has a feature to scan your system to figure out how to make it faster.

if you do decide to format partition your hard drive. I made a 10 gig partition for windows and made the rest of the space for media and other stuff. This way if your computer crashes or is running slow just reformat your 10 gig windows partition when you start with your fresh windows xp your second partition with all your media on it will still be there just like it was before.

Now theres a good idea

After years of putting up with Win98 I have what I think is the best system for XP.

I have my HDDs separated in three partitions - System, Apps and Data. I keep a Norton Ghost image of the System and Apps partitions and the Data is backed up normally.

So, whenever XP screws up, I just extract the Ghost image over System. Very quick and easy, and no need to format. It's back up in 15 minutes max.

Also, I only keep the apps I actually need on the PC and if I really need to try out something new, immediately uninstall it afterwards. With a 100Mbps internet connection my PC spends most of its life dowloading stuff, not actually running applications beyond Internet Explorer.

Anyway, I can't recommend separating the XP system part enough. Also, whenever you install something, make sure it's not installed in C:\Program files. Just get into the habit of changing it to D:\Program files. This way your backup of C: is always very light.

XP may not be perfect, but it's 1000% better than that Win98 POS.

That doesnt do anything performance wise, and is really just another hassle. If you wanted to you could use an extra hard drive to install programs to, but partitioning wont do anything for you in the ways of performance. Its usually just used for installing multiple OS's.

If your computer slow's down, there is a reason, and there are backgroud programs or a virus running. Computers dont just slow down over time for no reason. Some things you should do is defrag often, at least once a month. Set it to do it automatically when your asleep the first day of the month and then your not bothered with it interupting your computer needs. Something I cannot stress enough is not to visit porn sites. I know most of you probably do, and thats your choice, but porn not site not only cause a huge amount of spyware, but they also control your browser from time to time. Another thing is to delet your cookies every month and also your history. One of the best things to do is to install a mozilla browser (firefox or mozilla, I have both and they each have their ups and downs) and to never use IE again.

Have you ever just sat at you computer and watched pop-up's come up? Thats from IE's crappy security. Now Mozilla and Firefox can both do the same thing, but its more of a rare ocassion and once you stop the EXE (ctrl-alt-del then stop the process tree) it stops until you visit a site that demands you install their "software" aka spyware, and if you close the window they bring up 20 or 30 more windows all different sizes and it just keeps spreading. Mozilla or firefox are both extremely great browsers. Ive been using them both for about a year. My only complaint is that Mozilla has been controlled by certain sites and some pop ups still get to me every now and then, my only complaint with Firefox is for no reason, the program will close at random at least once every 3 months and when I try to open it again it will say to choose a profile, and when I try to open my profile it says its being used, then nomatter what you do, all your bookmarks are gone when you can get your profile back up and running. I have over 30 favorites and bookmarks, the most used being on the tabbed toolbar and having to re-do them every 3 months makes me mad. I hope they can fix that problem soon tho.

Another thing I do is right click on the C drive icon in my computer and turn off indexing. That seems to speed it up a little and I never use the search feature on my computer anyway. And there are other tips and tricks you can use through the admin tools to make it faster and stuff, but its just little things like turning wireless support off and im not going to go into detail because most people that will try it will turn something off that they need and then it wont work and they will freak out.