When I was cleaning my computer a few days ago, I found out something. A computer with a windows operating system doesn't only slow down because of fragmented stuff, a messed up registry or lots of fonts. One of the worst things that slow down you computers are installed programs that embed themselves in your operating system. Programs like Mozilla Firefox, Word, audio players, messengers, etc. These are all embedded in your operating system and constantly cause slowdown. I have found a way to work around this problem: use portable applications. They aren't embedded in your system, so they take less time to start and don't use to much space on your hard drive, while they are still exactly the same as the "real" programs. Especially low-end computers get a lot of advantages out of using portable applications on desktop computers. I use applications from http://portableapps.com/. I found out that especially Pigin Portable is a good piece of software to have. I removed Live Messenger and I now use Pidgin. It works with all messengers and it uses much less system recourses. Other good choices are Firefox Portable, Thunderbird Portable and VLC Media Player Portable. You should also try the suite, a small screen that contains al of your installed portable apps. It works great. My computer is like, twice as fast or something since I only use these programs, and they are all free. Isn't life great these days?
It's the registry's fault. Stupid stupid badly designed, non-modular registry. You have to realize that by the very way Windows opperates, most programs stick code into the registry when installd. You have to go and manually fix up your regustry every once and a while so your computer doesn't implode with suck. Ah how I miss the seperate config files of DOS and pre 95 Windows.
I'd want to clean it myself but, I would probably do more harm than good, and I don't trust programs such as RegEdit to clean it out for me...
I don't trust you either. RegEdit doesn't clen the registry for you. As its name implies, it is merley a program to allow you to edit the registry. You have to get a seperate program if you want it to be done for you
How well does it work for you? I've came across people who have said they have used cleaners to only find out it accidentally wiped out some important components in windows.
I have been using it for quite a long time now with no problems encountered. I do keep a backup copy of the registry though and CCleaner asks you if you would like to make back ups every clean up.
It's a bit of a necropost, but I really wanted to respond to this one. You should download Eusing Registry Cleaner. I already suggested using that program in my last tutorial, it's a lot faster and cleans mor crap then ccleaner. (I actually made a backup of my system registry and made both programs clean that copy, CCleaner wasn't as thorough as Eusing.)
I recomend using a Mac, so you can be registry free, virus free, addware free, spyware free and still able to Play StarCraft 2 once it comes out ;-)
Or you could continue to use a real computer with a real operating system. I'm way too lazy to do this, and since I know how to get the most out of Vista, I don't really need to do this. By how much does this speed your computer up, on average? (not just the OPers speed, but everybody's)
@ Marcusrodrigues I have both, haha EDIT: I used Euser, works great. My computer is already noticeably faster! Thanks for the recommendations!
