Advice needed on speeding up the start up time of a PC

colin1 · Captain Safety Joined: 17 Feb 2005 Karma :

Last year, I bought a new PC, thinking my 2 year old PC was getting a bit slow, so I'd benefit from getting something better.

I now use the old one upstairs, and realise that its fine, and can actually do similar graphics performance in modern warfare 2 to the newer one. The old one was from dell outlet, and was probably a better buy than the newer aldi medion noisy thing.

However, it takes 10 minutes from turning it on, to being useable.

At the moment, Im getting round this, by leaving it on all the time, often its downloading torrents. However at the moment, I've got a back log of movies I havent watched yet, and the hard drive is filling up, so not much point leaving it on overnight anymore.

I have heard of "the registry" and that this can be cleaned out.

I'm a bit daunted by the idea of doing a full reinstall, partly as I'd need to find the drivers CD that came with the PC.

Is there a handy free program, that I can use to clean things up a bit ? There was an Advert link on bcf, to registry mechanic, but you have to pay to use it fully.
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Howling TerrorOutOfOffice · Super Spammer Joined: 05 Dec 2008 Karma :

Hi, i would stay away from registry cleaners.
Far better off uninstalling apps you don't need.
If win XP or earlier Start-Run- type in msconfig
Select the Startup tab and uncheck the boxes for Adobe Reader and qtask for quicktime.
You may be able to untick other programs. Google search if its ok to do so.
Run a defrag (after you've deleted any gumf you no longer need)
Don't leave a disc in the tray or a memory card in a reader.

All the above are safe.

Pat
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T1z3R · World Chat Champion Joined: 23 Oct 2005 Karma :

speed it up by uninstalling crap you no longer use first of all.
then use msconfig from the command line and check what programs you have launching at startup.

if your concerned about spyware/malware then get some good tools for dealing with them like ccleaner etc. defrag your hard drive too if its quite full.

there are programs out there that can scan your system and create backups of all your driver files. i use drivermagician at work for this.
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Misc · World Chat Champion Joined: 15 Aug 2005 Karma :

I'd just format the thing, couldn't be easier you just follow the on screens steps. As for drivers, they should just be on your PCs home page. Just back up everything else.

Every time i format my PC it performs like new again.

brooky · Brolly Dolly Joined: 27 Jan 2006 Karma :

Another vote for Ccleaner.

https://www.ccleaner.com/download
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Hetzer · Super Spammer Joined: 19 Feb 2007 Karma :

Download Startup Inspector and switch off as much crap as you can that starts up with the PC. Also delete all your temporary internet files. And you should have NOTHING on the desktop other than shortcut icons.
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Paivi · World Chat Champion Joined: 30 Sep 2005 Karma :

Also run Disk Cleanup; this will compress files that are not being used, so will free up space. I went from 18% to 24% spare space on my ancient PC.

I also suffered from a very slow start-up until a few days ago, when a mate of mine told me to do all that start up stuff on msconfig and ccleaner; I had millions of stuff opening up, including long-redundant modems.
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SoND · World Chat Champion Joined: 10 Jul 2005 Karma :

Run CCleaner, EasyCleaner + Defraggler. In the first two you want to clear unnecessary files and the registry cleaner. If you have cookies selected then you will lose all your saved passwords in your browsers so uncheck it if you don't want this to happen.

When cleaning the registry there is a chance that it will remove a file required for a program to run requiring you to reinstall it other than that it is quite safe. Saying that, you should still back it up first.

https://www.ccleaner.com/

https://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/ecleane.htm

https://www.piriform.com/defraggler

There are other more intensive things you can do afterwards before resorting to a format but see how you get along with these.
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