At home I work on a 6+ year-old Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop. Yeah, I know, but that’s how it is.
Recently, the old bugger has been creeping to a near standstill. I used to laugh when my mother told me she would “fire up the WebTV, go start a pot of coffee, come back, click Inbox, go pour the coffee…” etc. Well, that’s how it was starting to be with my old laptop…
One day I had enough, and decided to Google possible solutions. I believe the exact phrase was “speed up windows xp” or something close to that…
Anyhow, within the first few results was a Microsoft article titled Restore Your Computer’s Performance with Windows XP. I figured if anyone knew how to speed-up that crappy-ass operating system, it would be them, right?
As it turns out, the author did!
The first few steps, Add or Remove Programs, Disk Cleanup, and Defrag are fairly common and didn’t do much. But when I got to Remove Autostart Programs, I got interested. And so did my laptop. Of course, this could be fairly dangerous, so definitely create a System Restore point. But after I removed a bunch of stuff, I actually saw an improvement!
But the real biggy came from a combination of clean-up programs. I installed all of the following, running them one right after the other, and each one found something the others didn’t…
Frustrating, yes, but after all this crap, my laptop actually runs okay now… Not great, but fast enough to actually work on it again…
So, for that, thanks, Microsoft, for making a crappy-ass operating system, but then at least having the courtesy to tell me how to maker it work almost-right again!
Happy computerating,
Atg