Greetings Everyone ...

[Washbush]

Greetings Everyone ...

I may be the newest newby onboard.  I did the installation yesterday, ran it for the first time last night, and followed up with a second full run this morning.  Absolutely no problems at all.  I am sure that I will have lots of questions as I go along, but, as of now, the OK ... that's Old Klunker ... seems to be noticably more perky at the moment.  So, thank you for that.  The OK is a seven year old HP Presario 2400us laptop with 2GB of memory.  Otherwise, it is as it came out of the box, except for software.  Even though I am supposed to have lots and lots of problems, I seem to be successfull (in my opinion) running Windows 7 Home.  The OK is at the end of a wireless connection, and the only real complaint I have has to do with streaming video.  I have the start/stop, jerky, stand still and balk problems.  Try and watch an auto race under those conditions.  The Olympics were impossible. My hopes are that by tweaking as much as I can, I will be able to reduce that to bare minimum.  Also, I seem to be getting the BCF (Blue Circle of Frustration) much too often, and recently for a longer amount of time, in addition to the fact that it seems to want to run as slow as molassis off and on.  If I can clear up some of these issues and keep it usable but less annoying, it will save me the cost of another unit, which, when the time comes, might just be an iPad. 


I'd like to hear from anyone near Bloomington, Indiana. 


Keep up the excellent work.  I am very impressed so far.  The GIU is terriffic.


John


Oh, I can tell already, I am going to learn to hate that Verification Nonsense very quickly.   

[Shane]

During the times you get the blue circle and the slow downs, look at the hard drive indicator light on the computer. Is it fully lit up? If so then that means what you are waiting on is the hard drive.

The hard drive is the bottle neck of performance on a computer. While the CPU and memory can do GB a sec the hard drive on the norm will only do maybe 50 MB and if you have a lot of programs accessing the drive it gets even slower as they all have to wait their turn.

Thats why on a system you can update to a SSD drive which is 20X faster and you see a huge performance increase.

If you run my simple system tweaker as well it may help. The goal is to take as much need off the hard drive as possible. And the older the drive the slower they go.

Also check and see how many things are running, open task manager and see the total number of processes. I have had customers come to me saying how it takes 15 min to boot up windows and how slow the system is. When I check the system they had over 120 things running! The hard drive has 1 arm that goes and does the reading and righting on the drive, now imagin trying to open 120 programs at startup. Once I disabled all those programs and unneeded services I got the process count to around 45 or so. After that and my tweaks the system was dramatically faster and boot time was cut down to 2 min. Also remember that with all those programs running Windows was using the page file heavily which is located on the hard drive slowing things down even more.

So on a old system like yours, run my simple system tweaker and try to cut down on the number of running programs, also use my free versions of my CleanMem tool on my other site pcwintech.com to keep memory under control (Which will also help keep use of the page file down as well) and you should get even more performance out of the system. :-D

Shane

[Washbush]

Just a quick reply ... I am very pleased to join the group.  I do like your work very much.  I am starting to use the Cloud more and more so my HD will have less and less on it as time goes by.  Is it silly to think that I could move all the files, etc., off this HD and run it with only the OS on it?  I just checked and I have 90 processes and 90 services running. 53% of memory. No wonder it's slow.  That is with only one program running but that is Chrome.  The bad news is that I haven't a clue what most of those process and service things are!  I have never paid any attention to them before now.  As I look at them, I have nothing but questions and most of them are "What the heck is that?"

For a long, long time this computer would boot up in an acceptable amount of time but it took 20 minutes to shut down.  I would go nuts every time I saw "reboot and this will run during start up." I fiddled and somehow managed to get it almost back to normal, about a minute or two.

I am an old retured guy and now I live alone.  I have a nice MacPro in the other room but I don't want to forget what I know about Windows.  After my wife died, I moved into a Senior Citizen apartment and I am the official computer fixer for our little piece of heaven here but I don't get involved in mechanical repairs other then very simple things.  I intend to take both your Simple and Full and put them on a jump drive and cut down on the time I spend playing with someone elses computer.  The Seniors here where I live are not well off, and they live very simply.  But, this past Christmas found many families chipping in to get Grandma her first computer or maybe a tablet.  So, it looks like I may have a full time job that will earn as much for me as yours does for you! 

Thanks for your care.  I am really looking forward to learning as much as I can about this entire subject.

John 

[Shane]

After you use my simple system tweaker
http://www.tweaking.com/content/page/simple_system_tweaker.html

Go to the start button and then run, in there put
msconfig.exe
and then hit enter.

When that opens up click on the services tab. Then put a check on "Hide Microsoft Services". Now go through the list and uncheck anything you think you dont need, dont worry this will only disable it and you can turn anything back on if you need to.

Now hit apply.

Now click on the startup tab, go through the list and uncheck anything you dont think you need at startup. Click apply.

Now reboot. Once backup see how many processes are in the background now :-D

Shane