Reply to thread

Message: [QUOTE="WilliamHenry, post: 11703990"] I am a total neophyte about tinkering to improve computer performance, so hopefully the reposnses will include step-by-step solutions. I am trying to improve speed and performance on my 5 yr. old Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop. I'm running Windows XP Professional (2002 ver w/ Svc Pack 2) with a Pentium 4 processor, 40 GB hard drive and 512 RAM, plus Office XP ver. 2002 as my primary programs. Don't do gaming or heavy video. I have way too many extraneous programs and drivers apparently overloading my C drive so that slows it down to a crawl. I want to move many of these off my C Drive and onto an external 80 GB hard drive (my F drive). I'm not sure how to do this or how to tell my systems where to go to look for drivers, etc. once they've been moved to another hard drive. I want to free up my C dive so that it's storing only those programs and drivers absolutely necessary for maximum computer performance given the age of my equipment and operating system. Can anyone provide me with extremely basic instructions on how to speed the computer up to gain greater performance, keeping in mind that I am totally new to this and do not know much about basic computer diagnostics. The computer was originally purchased from Dell in 2002 and came preloaded with Windows Me which was for me a disaster. My system has been upgraded several times, physically by adding RAM memory chips and by upgrading the OS to Windows XP Prof. (2002 ver), Office XP Small Business(2002 ver) , etc.. If I move all my data to the external drive and then reinstall from the disks provided by the manufacturer I'll end up with an inferior performing OS (Windows Me).. Is there a way to unload my system of extraneous programs, registry entries, .dll files, etc. that can speed up its performance without reverting to an ancient and uniformly regarded unsuccessful OS? I recently reinstalled Windows XP and that seemed to have mild improvement results, but the problem of too many discarded or unwanted programs trying to start in the background seems to remain. I've gone through the START >Control Panel>Add/Remove Programs and uninstalled anything I knew for sure I didn't want, but that populated list doesn't begin to show everything on my computer. When I do a Windows Explorer search and look at my C:\ drive under Programs I see a whole mess of programs I could probably live without but I'm concerned that going in and just deleting them won't totally remove them and will leave commands on my registry that continue to slow everything down. Many of the programs installed that show up in my C:\Programs list don't show up on the Add/Remove Programs utility in Control Panel. Is there a way to improve things without going back to Windows Me? Many thanks in advance for any help whatsoever. [/QUOTE]

Verification