Tech Help

[Higher Than Hope]

I've had my desktop for quite some time, and it is running much much much more slowly lately than it used to. I've been told by a few friends that every website you ever visit stores some where on your computer, even after you delete viewing history and cookies and whatnot in internet options, and they've offered to remove them to get my computer running faster.

I've always had to come up with some shady excuse why they can't do it for fear of them seeing some of the websites like this that I visit sometimes. Does anybody know how I can do this on my own, or at least get my computer back up to speed?

 

[chevre]

What they say is simply untrue. If you clear your history, and purge your cache and cookies, all the space that was used to store information from these websites will be freed. In terms of disk space, history and cookies won't matter much. Your cache is a different story -- it could get quite large depending on your settings. However, you can always manually clear it or set it to a smaller size.

Basically, what they say is not very accurate. If it's gotten slow, there are a few likely culprits. One might be that you have too little RAM to handle more modern applications. Another could be that your disk is beginning to fail (though this would make it really slow). Check how much memory you're using and how much swap space. If you're using a lot of swap (page file on Windows), that can slow you down quite a lot.

 

[Higher Than Hope]

Thanks. What is this Cache and how can I get to it?

 

[chevre]

The cache is basically a place to store files that are frequently accessed on your local computer (or other places on the network) to avoid hitting the server for the file every time you need it. This avoids wasing your bandwidth and server resources by doing a lot of redundant downloads.

To clear it:
In Firefox it's pretty easily done with Tools->Clear Private Data (not sure in IE, but it should be easy to find it in your menus). Make sure Cache is clicked and tell it to clear. Don't expect any performance improvement, however, unless your disk space is seriously low.

I'd suggest looking into your RAM usage, and perhaps try defragmenting your disk. Fragmentation should not be a huge problem most of the time if you're using NTFS (and if you're using at least Win2k/XP you are most likely using it), but it won't hurt anything.

To see your RAM usage, open Task Manager (ctrl+alt+del) and check the Performance tab. If "PF Usage" is very high, you may want to consider buying more RAM (once you start approach 2x your physical memory in PF usage, you'll start to thrash like hell and everything will grind on at an agonizingly slow pace).

 

[Kokuei]

You also might wanna check your computer for spyware and adware.

Ad Aware and Spybot Search & Destroy.

Also it might be registery errors and i can reccommend a program for that too.

CleanMyPC Registry Cleaner - Official Site of CleanMyPC Registry Cleaner go here and Download Clean My PC registry cleaner. then PM me and i will give you my activation code for it. And help you with it. ^_^

 

[Grutzvalt]

IObit's Advanced System CLeaner sounds like "Super mega antivirus 2009- $50 to get rid of viruses!"...but it is actually pretty decent...Found like 500 errors on my machine, even after I cleaned it with a different cleaner...