OT: Degunking my WindowsXP

[John Rofrano]

> I scan for Virus & spyware regularly, Defrag, occasional registry cleaner…

If you are already doing all of that then it sounds like you are doing everything you can to keep your system running smooth. It’s a shame that Windows is a junk magnet that just gets slower and slower with age.

One thing to check is how many programs are loading resident into memory when you startup that you don’t need. Run MSCONFIG and check the Startup tab and disable anything you don’t think you need. The great thing is that you can re-enable them with just a check in case you disable something you need so it’s non-destructive.

[soapbox]
It seems that every software manufacturer today feels compelled to suck up your resources with a resident program that checks for updates like that’s all you bought your PC to do. I like Sony’s idea of only checked when you run the program and giving you the ability to turn that off. Unfortunately, Adobe, Apple, Nero, Install Shield, and others deem it necessary to run several resident programs regardless all the time. Check for Quicktime (qttask), iTunesHelper, CyberLink/WinDVD (or your favorite DVD player), Adobe Reader (reader_sl), Nero servers and indexers (NMBgMonitor, NMIndexStoreSvr, NBKeyScan, NeroCheck), Hewlett Packard print utilities (HPWuSchd2, hpcmpmgr), Install Shield (ISUSPM), etc. Those are just some of the junk you don’t need at startup.
[/soapbox]

In the past I’ve used System Mechanic 7 to keep things clean. Sometimes it gets a bit too aggressive and will disable a program you need but in general it finds the junk and disables it. I also use Raxco PerfectDisk 2008. It has a mode that will keep your system defragged during idle times. Good Luck (I hate house cleaning) 😉

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Magee]

Thanks for your reply.
Yeah, I do pretty good at keeping those start-up programs down. I even turned off a few more after your post.
I updated my video driver – though I don’t know why the old one would turn bad, but hey, I gave it a try.
Someone on another forum had an interesting suggestion – he does a dual-boot, both with XP, one partition is just for video related software, the other has all the other stuff like Word and whatever. He surfs the net on this one. I may try that at some point.
Another guy does a Disk-Image after his fresh install so he can revert to it if he needs to.
Anyway, maybe I’ll get the time and patience down the road to mess with all that.
Cheers