man what a difference!!!

[kc8oye]

I went through my task list. line by line.. looked up each of processes running.. and shut down a BUNCH of crap I didn't need.

I even still had a dell application running for when this computer was under warranty 6 years ago.

 

I deleted some cd auto insertion app that got installed with my sound card I don't need

some kind of media player that got installed along with something else I didn't want

shut down both adobe and java's auto updates

also shut down java's pre-cache

shut down yahoo IM's auto update

turned off the ATI control panel since I never use it (didn't delete this one, just turned it off)

also turned off the drivers for alternate input devices like a graphics tablet, since I don't have one.

 

I can already 'feel' the difference in how my machine is running. the real test will be the reboot time.. see if it can beat it's base line of 2min 49seconds to shut down and restart

[stangeba]

Sounds good! My (8 year old DELL) crashed after we had a power failure several weeks ago. I reloaded everything and it was doing fine but now I'm starting to get several error messages, on start up, about files being corrupt. It is running all the items I use fine. I wonder if my hard drive is starting to fail!

Bruce

[kc8oye]

allan: I'd rather not do that to this machine.

 

and it's really not necessary. I really trimmed a LOT of fat off the ol girl.. and that Dell app was the one crashing all the time so I don't feel bad that it's gone

[kc8oye]

bruce: I would think so. I've never had problems with a hard drive after loosing power.

with any version of windows.

[amsterdam84]

I know I'm due for a reformat. It's been a couple years since building it and it has gone from about 30-40 second restart to about 4-5 minutes to be completely ready to go in Windows. Just been afraid of windows loosing track of my raid setup. Over 600GB of stuff on that drive. Most is backed up but theres always something to miss.

 

Tim, thats one reason I personally boycott storebought computers because they package so much stuff with windows that it slows it way down. Too many memory hog programs or software that expires after 2 months. Found some deals on TigerDirect for barebone i7 computers so I may get one sooner than I thought.

[kc8oye]

Mike: My dad custom ordered this one from Dell, so it's not technically store-bought, but I agree totally.

 

when i first got it.. it ran about as fast as a fly on fly paper.

first thing I did.. was get rid of the Norton Security Suite.. it should be criminal for a program to be able to use that many resources that it slows a p4 3ghz down to about what my k6-2 400mhz could do with windows 98!!!

 

my windows 98 machine at home will happily run for about 3 weeks between reboots even with heavy usage. it takes some time and effort, but if you track down the problem causers one at a time and fix them... you can make windows remarkably stable

 

that sprtcmd.exe which is part of Dell's crap.. was the source of a lot of problems for this machine.. I'm happy to see it gone

 

i think I'm going to be replacing a fan on this machine soon.. it has a combination case and cpu fan (one fan for both purposes) so i can't afford that fan to fail entirely...

I really like these dell cases. they are mostly 'tool-less' design and really quite solid for being like that.

it has a large plastic duct that sits right over the top of the cpu so that the case fan draws air over the cpu heat sink and out of the case.... sorry other way around, it draws outside air in and blows it over the cpu.

the reason I like this setup, is the 3" case fans are far more reliable then those dinky little 1" clip-on-to-the-cpu type fans.