Less is More: Freeing-up CPU Bandwidth on Your Home Computer (Part 2)

My computer and I are engaged in a continuous war against each other, so this advice is most helpful! Thanks for writing this

Keeping the system tray clean is definately a step in the right direction. All the icons in there are for programs that are constantly running whether you are using them or not.

Also if all else fails and you think your computer is hopeless. Try backing up all your data and wiping your hard drive. By booting from a Windows XP CD you should be able to erase your partition and start from a clean slate. (BACKUP FIRST!)

Yes, System-mech is a good thing along with Fix-It and other like ones which unfortunately are not free.

On my opinion one what could improve PC performances is better IRQ and RAM handling. Set of IRQ is restricted so I have not any idea here (maybe multi-core hard/software). As most of software had been designed for one-core processor I couldn't evaluate multi-core advantages for awhile. But RAM and disk swoping/caching have perspectives for average user.

As two systems' user I've noticed linux is using practically all the RAM its possesses and it use RAM much more better than Windows. I have carried out a testing copy for a huge file on the same machine. Linux performed at least 30-40% faster. Therefore here's a chance for Windows to perform better. Linux is not perfect thing especially for average user though.

In windows 3.0's times such product as Adobe Photoshop 4.0 had own driver for disk cache which was working very good.

Are there any one third-vendor software packages for Windows which could improve(substitute) windows cache and RAM handling or it's restricted due to proprietary character of MS OS? I'm wondering about is somewhere at least reliable virtual disk RAM driver working under Win? By now a huge lot of RAM, a contemporary PCs stuffed, ridiculously ineffective.

A good, free utility is crapcleaner (or ccleaner) for weeding some of the garbage out. It's a lot easier to run something simple often and stay on top of things than to wait until the machine gets bogged down.

Make it a habit to keep everything important in one directory tree (i.e. in your My Documents) to make it easier to perform regular backups using commercial backup software, copy/paste to a different location (preferably a separate physical drive that is not part of the same machine in case of theft, fire, or spontaneous combustion).

For the last several years my laptop has been running fedora linux. While the learning curve was surprisingly short I've been very impressed with the 1.4GHz Celeron's performance and reliability since the install. Combine this with the immunity to the viruses that plague windows machines and perpetual security issues and it's tough to argue against.

Anyone who asks me what kind of computer they need for at home so they can go about basic internet tasks (browsing, downloading & email) I tell them to try linux. New life is breathed into older machines that have retired versions of windows and don't have the horsepower for Vista or whatever comes next. I generally even install it for them or provide a livecd so they can get started.

Thanks for the info, any help is good help.

A one stop shop for XP background programs is tweakxp, They have a fairly complete list of programs, what they do, whether to disable, manual, or leave on auto.

After, I find out what they have then I narrow down the weird stuff.

Hope this helps, and have a great week