I'm running WXP3 and it seems like it's running slower and slower.
For instance, a week ago I did a DISK CLEANUP and then a DEFRAG (1 hard
drive with two partitions and a second drive unpartioned.)
A word on the terminology. *Both* drives are partitioned. To partition
a drive is to create one or more partitions on it, and it can't be
used unless you have at least one partition there. Undoubtedly what
you mean is that the second drive has only a single partition, not
that it's unpartitioned.
Each one took an extraordinary amount of time.
How long (at least approximately) is an "extraordinary amount of
time"?
Today I ran it in Safe Mode and it seemed considerably faster.
Can I do something to speed it up in NORMAL mode?
There are two main reasons why a computer becomes slow:
1. Malware infection is the most common reason these days. What
anti-virus and anti-spyware programs do you run? Are they kept up to
date?
2. Background programs that start automatically when you boot can
often slow down the computer. Here's my standard post on the subject:
On each program you don't want to start automatically, check its
Options to see if it has the choice not to start (make sure you
actually choose the option not to run it, not just a "don't show icon"
option). Many can easily and best be stopped that way. If that doesn't
work, run MSCONFIG from the Start | Run line, and on the Startup tab,
uncheck the programs you don't want to start automatically.
However, if I were you, I wouldn't do this just for the purpose of
running the minimum number of programs. Despite what many people tell
you, you should be concerned, not with how *many* of these programs
you run, but *which*. Some of them can hurt performance severely, but
others have no effect on performance.
Don't just stop programs from running willy-nilly. What you should do
is determine what each program is, what its value is to you, and what
the cost in performance is of its running all the time. You can try
google searches and ask about specifics here.
Once you have that information, you can make an intelligent informed
decision about what you want to keep and what you want to get rid of.
