Subj : Question To : Marty Blankenship From : Jeff Guerdat Date : Thu Jan 22 2004 06:13 am On 01-21-04, Marty Blankenship said to All: MB>I have a question that I would like to find out what I could do to make it MB>better. First off I am running Win XP Home on a celeron 2.0 GHz with a 60 MB>gig hard drive. I have had the computer for about a year now and it seems MB>to be slowing down. I have about 9 or 10 gigs left of free space on the MB>hard drive and I run defrag once a month. I have turned off just about MB>everything that I could to help speed it up but it doesn't seem to be MB>working. I have another 20 gig hard drive that I could install and was MB>thinking if I did this I could move the swap file to that drive and maybe MB>help speed it up. I know that it would help but I want to know how I can MB>get my computer back to the speed it once was. Thanks for any help anyone MB>may give. Disk space doesn't usually speed things up. Fragmentation can cause this but only during disk access. If it's slow once the disk has finished reading then it's all in memory and disk won't do a thing. If memory is relatively small and you're swapping frequently, a swap disk is only a partial answer - more memory would help by orders of magnitude. Adding and deleting files makes the machine slower since files and registry entries don't get completely deleted, adding to file system and registry bloat - takes time to read through the extra crap. Just keeping current on software does this, too, by adding new features and, hence, size to the executables. Your machine may also seem slow just because you're used to it and maybe you've experienced faster computers recently (i.e. it's all in your head). My current sure seemed fast for the first month or so and then it seemed to slow down although it wasn't actually taking more time - I just got used to the speed. This sort of experience is one reason some folks reformat the drive periodically and reinstall software - gets rid of things that have piled up over time and a fresh start strips it down to the basics. You need to figure out a procedure to ensure that you don't lose data to do this so proceed carefully. ___ *Durango b211 * DurangoMail for Windows NT/9x --- Maximus/2 3.01 * Origin: COMM Port OS/2 juge.com 204.89.247.1 (281) 980-9671 (1:106/2000) .