hockerby said:
My PC is 5 years old, and it has a new hard drive. I find that when
I turn it on it takes forever to 'warm up',
Please clarify exactly how long "forever" is. Everyone has a different idea
of what words like that mean.
especially loading OE for
e-mails, and getting into IE. I have 75% free space on the hard
drive, I defrag and disc scan about one a month, and I have Norton
anitvirus and Spycatcher operating.
I'm not claiming that your problem is malware--I don't know that--but I'd
like to point out that the fact that you have "Norton anitvirus and
Spycatcher operating" is no guarantee that you don't. Let me make two points
in that regard:
1. Norton anti-virus is probably the worst anti-virus product on the market.
2. Regarding anti-spyware, note that just using one product is *not* good
enough. Eric Howes, who has done
extensive testing on Anti-Spyware products, states:
"No single anti-spyware scanner removes everything. Even the best-performing
anti-spyware scanner in these tests missed fully one quarter of the
"critical" files and Registry entries" See
http://spywarewarrior.com/asw-test-guide.htm
I don't know anything about Spycatcher in particular, and have no opinions
on how effective it is, but I caution you not to rely on it alone.
After the initial 'warm up' it operates OK.
What do you mean by "warm up"? Are you talking about how long it takes to
boot?
My personal view is that the attention many people pay to how long it takes
to boot is unwarranted. Assuming that the computer's speed is otherwise
satisfactory, it may not be worth worrying about. Most people start their
computers once a day or even less frequently. In the overall scheme of
things, even a few minutes to start up isn't very important. Personally I
power on my computer when I get up in the morning, then go get my coffee.
When I come back, it's done booting. I don't know how long it took to boot
and I don't care.
However if you do want to address it, it may be because of what programs
start automatically, and you may want to stop some of them from starting
that way. 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 get more information
about these at
http://castlecops.com/StartupList.html. If you can't find it
there, 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.
