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“The computer is so slow these days”

It’s surprising how many ordinary people - complete non-tech-heads – simply put up with their computers at home, computers that have become appallingly slow and virus-infested over time. It isn’t until an unsuspecting nerd shows up at home that they complain about these problems, not unlike the innumerable occasions that acquaintances pounce on my physician father with their aches, pains and niggles during social visits.

Maddeningly, the simple optimization and clean-up these machines need (whenever I’m called upon to do so, never explicitly but as an inevitable extension of the litany of complaints themselves) are so common that I’ve often wished for a script that I can carry around with me (running something off a USB drive that you tote along with you is so much more impressive to non-techies than downloading that same thing off the Internet) and run it each time.

Here is what seems to work wonders for “the computer is so slow these days”:

Hardware

Is the computer really old? Does it have enough free hard drive space and RAM?

Software and security

  • Replace browser – Internet Explorer 6 or 7 with Firefox. Install Adblock Plus. Populate bookmarks toolbar with commonly used sites – email, online banking, news and suchlike. Demonstrate how to add new bookmark to toolbar and how to rename it. Change default download location to Desktop. Anything else just confuses ordinary folks (“where did my download go?”). Log in once to each commonly used website and save password.
  • Replace Adobe Acrobat Reader with Foxit Reader, Windows Media Player with Winamp for music and VLC Media Player for video. Set file associations.
  • Download AVG Free antivirus and run one update after the install. Demonstrate how to manually update every day or two.

Housekeeping

  • Clean up the desktop. Create a “Other Programs” folder and move all shortcuts not commonly used to it.
  • Move My Documents to drive D: (any drive other than C:). Explain why this is useful in case computer crashes.
  • Create an “Installation files” folder under My Documents and move all setup files into it.
  • If there’s a largish, empty hard drive about twice the size of the installed RAM, change the location of the page file to this drive. Change the name of the hard drive to DONOTUSE (E:) or suchlike.
  • Download and run Ccleaner once.
  • Finally, defragment all hard drives and restart.

This is the 20% effort – 80% gain list of things a common computer needs after 2 or 3 years of use. It annoys me that OEMs – and the corner computer guy – don’t do their bit to make things easier:

  • Separate data from the operating system – why ship computers with one large C: drive?
  • Anti-virus – ship a robust, free antivirus instead of trial versions of commercial ones. What percentage upgrades unwittingly/unwillingly and what percentage is left vulnerable?
  • If you’re going to ship a small monitor with a resolution like 1024×768, then merge the address bar and standard bar, and narrow the title bar in Windows Explorer to gain several pixels of vertical space.
  • Ship Foxit/Winamp/VLC/Firefox without associated toolbars, desktop icons, free/ad/spyware.
  • Ship a demo video explaining commonly used maintenance tasks – defragment, update anti-virus, even how to add bookmarks, save passwords and so on.

Now there are tremendous incentives for OEMs to bundle tons of crud with powerful computers (and powerful disincentives against not doing so), but I bet - perhaps naively, but also with experience – that customers will willingly trust you (whether you’re an OEM or assembler) when they buy a new computer, instead of you having to run ads that say “forget the last time we fooled you with a fast computer - this time, this new computer’s really really fast…”

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August 6, 2009 ·  Post to Twitter ·  Email this ·  Uncategorized ·  6 Comments


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6 Comments


  1. shrey on August 6th, 2009 10:06 am

    Being a nerd/geek (which term do you think is better?) myself, I follow most of the mentioned practices already. The shifting of My Documents and Page file are two good ideas that I never thought of. And I couldn't agree more on the OEMs/Assemblers not doing their bits to help the poor user.

  2. GWBE on August 7th, 2009 9:12 am

    That's a really useful post Rahul.

  3. Rahul Gaitonde on August 7th, 2009 12:14 pm

    Yup. In fact, OEMs strike agreements (desktop shortcuts, pre-installed toolbars) that deliberately make it more difficult for users (or, with one large C: drive, more dangerous).

  4. Rahul Gaitonde on August 7th, 2009 12:16 pm

    Thanks, GWBE. Hope it shakes your computer out of (possible) lethargy!

  5. Niranjan on August 9th, 2009 5:07 am

    Multiple partitions on the same physical drive don't really help. It does nothing to speed up the seek times, which is where the worst latency lies. There is also a lot of bloat, mostly from the startup programs and things that stay running all the time. An average user will get a better bang for their buck by just cleaning the startup program list.

  6. Rahul Gaitonde on August 9th, 2009 12:51 pm

    Re: multiple partitions, I recommend that for i.) security in case of a
    fatal OS crash and ii.) reduction in fragmentation on the c: drive (also why
    I recommend moving the page file to a dedicated partition)

    I forgot to mention cleaning up startup programs through “msconfig”. I
    always do that too. In fact, I covered that bit in this post from some time
    ago: “HOWTO: Speed up XP and Vista, reclaim disk space, tweak
    performance<http://www.rahulgaitonde.org/2008/04/25/speed-xp-vista-reclaim-disk-space/>
    “

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