Haven't run anything in a long time. Anyone suggest a good diagnostic to run to see what's going on with my computer.. running sluggish for some reason and the net seems slow even though I have a 16mbps connection
Do you regularly virus scan, clean your registry, defrag, etc? No? Hit em all up Jack!: A personal favorite I use for tidying up.. http://www.piriform.com/CCLEANER How to shut off programs you don't use at start-up that may be eating your memory http://www.switched.com/2009/03/03/how-to-shut-off-startup-programs-windows/ How to defrag, hey, just covering bases here, some people don't know this. http://windows.about.com/od/maintainandfix/ss/defragment.htm -follow that minus the chkdsk personally. I find it's a waste of time if you know your drive is fine. What anti-virus software do you use? Run an actual scan at all? If you tell me you have Norton, I'm gonna smack ya. Here's one I use...works well enough.. http://www.avast.com/en-us/index -obviously the free one. Speaking of Anti-Virus, you check for Malware? http://www.malwarebytes.org/ -just dl it, its free with this 14 day trial thingy on the on-site scanner. Malware!!? Oh noes, what about Spy-ware? http://www.safer-networking.org/index2.html -again, you don't NEED the TeaTimer background thing running all the time, unless you don't mind a Vista environment.. (Allow/Deny?) And finally, go through and clean up all old programs you don't use lol. As far as 'monitoring' stuff goes, Task Manager is really all you need..but it's kinda useless if you don't know what is what. If even after you've done all this, you find alot of memory is being eaten up, sort the list by the largest hog there and google what the program is. =P The last step after this if it's so slow, is to check on the health of your router. Try pluging your computer directly into the modem, and see if that makes a difference. If it does, well..found your problem, haha. I can't really think of anything else to add here.. But knowing the style of this particular form, a certain officer may be in to correct SOMETHING e.e I usually try to hit these items up about once or twice a month, but it's been a while for myself. Good luck. Edit: Now that I think about it, why isn't there a sticky of such a thing on this forum?
When I still ran those kinds of programs on my pc I used to use Tuneup Utilities (a paid program, free if u know where to look ) but now I just format every 6 months or so to get rid of all the junk that accumulates on my computer. CCleaner, Spywareblaster, and Spybot Search and Destroy (all of which are free) are all highly recommended for maintaining your computer running clean and efficient. Filehippo.com also has some freeware defrag programs if you want one.
I have malware bytes and avg pro. I think I might run a full defrag sometime soon... Thanks for the reminders.. I had forgotten about some of this stuff. Thanks again rae!
AVG has a nice PC Tuner trial you might want to try. If it's boggin' it's boggin' though, sometimes the background processes just get too convoluted. Might want to consider format and reinstall if it's getting to be a brick wall. Good question. There should be a subfolder in Tech Talk for these stickies, as each troubleshooter probably uses a somewhat different set of tools for maintenance tasks. I'd say put them all in one thread but then it's just a mess with too much redundant information, and the order of posting would just degrade it to a giant wall of unorganized text...
Outside the typos, yeah that's what I was thinking. However, I was only a few mins after Raelinoith in seeing the thread unlike you, but she covered the basics. And yeah, pretty much all of it is going to become redundant, minus programs/tools people use. Only need one thread for general trouble shooting/maintenance methods imo. Only other thing I can think of atm to throw in here is to keep in mind to clean the physical PC out too, clean dust off heat sinks and fans, check connections, ect ect. (I've opened up way to many PCs to see the processors heat sinks and fans caked with dust and they wonder whats wrong. >.>)
And Rael is a she not a he.. =D Also, seems to have helped a bit even though no virus or malware was found or anything like that.. I did clean up 3gb of crap with ccleaner though lol
Noted and fixed. That's good, I imagin' you had a nice buildup of invalid registry keys and general junk. lol.