Win7 Help

[KG4CGC]

Just did a complete reinstall of Win7 home premium on the laptop and did all the updates and it's dragging ass.

I had to do it because I couldn't get rid of all the crap and glitches that were showing up and making it act buggy. I ran all the stuff we're supposed to run to get rid of mal/ad/spyware etc. Nothing could be found and just before I changed it, AVG wouldn't even boot up through the system anymore. I couldn't download a new copy. Matter of fact, I couldn't download any antivirus or any antimal etc ware software at all. and it even seemed like admin control was taken over because suddenly I needed admin permission to do anything and I am the admin here. It wouldn't even do updates.

Anyway, I reformatted and have a fresh copy of Win7 running with all 600 updates. Instead of AVG I'm using F-Secure and its firewall. Anyway, it's slower than a lead slug.
AMD turion x2 RM-75 @2200MHz.
4096 ram
bios f.23
2010 HP Touchsmart tx2 notebook pc.

Any suggestions are welcome and no, I'm not going to get a new machine.
Thanks!

[PA5COR]

Something not right there.
I'm dual boot on the old lappy here, Acer Travelmate 7200G dual core Pentium 2 GHz and just 512 Mb video card in it, 4 Gb mem.
W7 runs fine, using the microsoft security essentials as virusscanner/firewall.
Just switched off some of the video gimmicks for the look to get a bit faster video build up, but it is running fast enough, just as well as XP-Pro here.
Might the videocard be the bottleneck?

[KG4CGC]

Doubt it. Laptop using same drivers as before.

[KC2UGV]

Stupid question: Are all the vents clear?

[NQ6U]

Did you remember to release the parking brake?

[K7SGJ]

Did you remember to release the parking brake?

No one uses those any more, now they just turn their processor toward the curb.

[KG4CGC]

Stupid question: Are all the vents clear?

They are clear.
Ran fine before except for the bugs it was picking up that all the anti-stuff started ignoring.

The question maybe, should be, is there a "LITE" version of Win7 that can be turned on? I don't remember so many processes having to run before.

[ad4mg]

They are clear.
Ran fine before except for the bugs it was picking up that all the anti-stuff started ignoring.

The question maybe, should be, is there a "LITE" version of Win7 that can be turned on? I don't remember so many processes having to run before.

There are a number of settings that can be dialed back to speed things up, Charles, most visual and just for ascetics. File indexing should be turned off for a big speed boost. You need to look at which processes are using up the RAM, as it sounds like you're using a considerable amount of virtual RAM (swapfile). Also, I'd immediately uninstall most "helper" applications bundled with the OS. I'm taking that you have an HP machine? They love to load their bloatware along with the OS, much like any manufacturer.

I'll start my one Win 7 machine in a bit and give you some specific info on things to try.

[KG4CGC]

Thank you.
Yes, I was searching for bloatware but let me go look at file indexing.

[ad4mg]

To turn off indexing, open the Indexing Options Control Panel window (if you just type "index" in the Start button search box, you'll see that choice at the top of the start menu), click "Modify" and remove locations being indexed and file types, too. If you want to leave search indexing on, but find that it occasionally slows you down, you can stop its process when you need extra speed. Right-click on Computer either in the Start menu or on the desktop, choose Manage. Then double-click Services and Applications, then Services. Find Windows Search, and double click on that. From this properties dialog, you can choose a Startup type of Manual or Disabled to have the process silent by default.

Top 12 ways to speed up Windows 7 (Pc-Mag article): http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2364937,00.asp

[KG4CGC]

Chipping away at it little by little. Indexing was off but that could have happened when I skinned it in XP Classic.
Thanks for the link. I checked it out yesterday but it was so sluggish I had to give up. Loading faster today.

The HP bloat, I'll have to look each one of those up individually. I can't tell what dies what just based on the name. As for the games, I only want one and that is Chess.

[ad4mg]

Chipping away at it little by little. Indexing was off but that could have happened when I skinned it in XP Classic.
Thanks for the link. I checked it out yesterday but it was so sluggish I had to give up. Loading faster today.

The HP bloat, I'll have to look each one of those up individually. I can't tell what dies what just based on the name. As for the games, I only want one and that is Chess.

Well, that article covered most of my tricks. One thing I do is to set a fixed size for swap file (virtual memory), to prevent it from constantly being resized. I usually start with a figure equal to the amount of RAM x 2, or maybe even 3, then set the minimum and maximum sizes to the same values. That creates a swap file that remains constant in size. This may require a restart.

[KC2UGV]

If you have an SD card slot, insert a 2GB or 4GB card you don't need, and set the entire thing to be used as a RAM Boost. Made a night and day difference with my netbook and Windows 7.

[KG4CGC]

If you have an SD card slot, insert a 2GB or 4GB card you don't need, and set the entire thing to be used as a RAM Boost. Made a night and day difference with my netbook and Windows 7.

Have not done that recently but in the past it over heated everything and brought on a forced shutdown. I'll try that again.

[KG4CGC]

Tried a 4 gig stick in the slot and it actually made it even slower.

I think after having gone through all these tips and tricks, it's time to dump F-Secure from this machine and try Avast.

[KG4CGC]

Avast was painfully slow then I remembered that AVG has a simple utility to scan and fix things like registry errors. I did the switch and ran the utility and found 68,883 registry errors among other things.
Seems to be happy but I'll give it the acid test with Youtube since watching a video was maxing out the CPU cycles.

Let's cross our fingers, knees and toes knees and toes.




ETA: 64% to 85%. Still a bit much but an improvement.

[KG4CGC]

Chrome seems to run a little lighter but pulls a consistent 78% on the CPU when running online video. Firefox was bouncing around between 64-85% as I stated earlier.

Still more fat to trim.

[WØTKX]

I feel your pain Charles, tho my main system never got that bad. Took a while to hunt them down.
Developed latency issues that affected the use of my main shack PC that runs the Flex 3000.

Keep plugging away. The Win7 computer management tools are a big help, tho they are arcane:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Bb742441.mmcov10_big(l=en-us).gif

You can plug in multiple "monitors" to watch all sorts of things such as disk swapping, CPU load, etc.
Luke knows these well, I'm sure. While there are all kinds of downloadables, these come with Win 7.

First, it was the Brother printer app, it got auto updated... and became chatty on the web.
Then, some of the cool Win7 gadgets had done the same, particularly the multiple clocks.

Killed 'em, don't need 'em.

A few other tweaks, that were all network related such as stopping auto negotiation of speed.
I was running BOTH wireless and wired ethernet at the same time, for convenience.

Added another router w/wireless in the house, and only run a single wired ethernet connection.

Now, I can even run the Flex AND the PlayOn streaming media app at the same time. Whew.

Only my IRC chat app PLUS too many browser tabs open in Chrome causes latency and freezes of the PowerSDR app now.

I DO use G-Data AV software, it is a subscription. It is the best AV I have found for low system latency and effectiveness.

[KG4CGC]

Thanks and turning off Aero Effects really did the trick. :)

[WØTKX]

Oh, shit yea. I NEVER run that.