Things that will slow your machine

  1. The more that you put on your hard drive, the slower is goes.  This is because even if you keep your hard drive defragmented, it takes time to find the files the program is looking for.   Each program is made up of little files, not one big one.  When you launch a program, it must find all the little files, put them in the right order and present them to you on your screen.  The more you put for it to look through, the longer it takes to launch your program.  Eric's Rule: When your hard drive becomes more than 50% full, begin thinking about a new one.   When your hard drive becomes 75% full, it begins to slow down exponentially until 90%, when you start getting error messages.  So, when it is 75% full, either start clearing out old programs or data or both and start saving your pennies, because the time is near.

  2. Fragmented drives. Fragmenting is normal.  When ever you delete something it creates an open space that is filled, or partially filled when you save something later.  This is an efficient way to fill your hard because no space is wasted.  When you call up a file, part of it may be here and part of it there and another part of it in another place.  The computer finds all the parts, puts them together and presents them to you on the screen.  This takes time.  If all the parts are contiguous then it does not take as long to find them.  Putting the parts next to each other is called defragmenting.  See how to defragment here.

  3. Compressed drives.  Don't do it.  Compressing a drive means that your CPU has to uncompress the file. use it, then recompress the file.  This causes too much CPU power to be used compressing and uncompressing instead of working on what you need.

  4. Screen Savers.  Cute, nice, unnecessary.  Even though you don't see them when you start using your machine, they still keep running in the background.  Use "Blank Screen" and speed up your machine. After Dark screen savers are the worst.  The screen savers that come with Windows are the least burdensome.  After Dark screen savers may break your machine.

  5. Advanced Power Management.  I use it to save electricity, but it slows down your machine.

  6. A full "Recycle Bin".  See number 1.

  7. Believe or not, the number of items on your desktop.  Try to keep the number down to a reasonable amount because the CPU has to paint those graphics 60 times a second.

  8. Old printer drivers.  Often old printer drivers are not optimized for new programs.  Get the new ones from www.hp.com,www.canon.com, etc.  In Windows 95, it is no longer necessary to wait until printing is completed to go on and do other things.  Is your printer slow? Printer speed is directly related to processor speed and RAM amount in Windows 95.

There are many more, but this is enough to get you started.  If you want more tips get WinTune from Windows Magazine.

 

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