Revitalising a slow machine

DoubleCheese · 7 Mar 2009 at 11:15

My PC has started to feel quite slow now and I'm not 100% sure how to get it back up to speed. Specs below

C2D E6420 @ 2.8Ghz
Gigabyte DS3 mainbaord
2 x 320GB SATA HDD's in Raid 0 (Partitioned, OS, GAMES, Music, Digital Photos))
1 x 320GB HDD
X1800 XT Gfx card
Audidy sound card

The boot times used to be fast, now it takes a good minute or two to get to the desktop and useable. Processes running are Skype, MSN, Steam, Avast etc. I have a few games installed, about 25Gb of music, 160Gb of digital photos.

Now here's the problem, some of these are spanned across the RAID array and some are backed up onto the separate HDD.

If I re-installed the OS (XP) would I loose the rest of the data on the RAID array? The OS is on a separate partition as above.

Any other ideas/tips?

fobose · 7 Mar 2009 at 11:20

As long as you moved any imporant files that might be on the OS partition to another partition on the RAID 0 or your 320GB hard drive you will be fine.

dun · 7 Mar 2009 at 11:28

I used to have this all the time on XP. Reinstalling everything every 6 months or so got old, but to be honest I haven't had to reinstall Vista once yet and I've had it installed well over a year.

J.B · 7 Mar 2009 at 11:32

If it is on a seperate partition then the other data wont be affected. Of course, you will have to reinstall all your programmes again.

Personally I hate reformatting, have you tried running CCleaner and Auslogic defrag to try and speed her up?

DoubleCheese · 7 Mar 2009 at 11:54

I've actually run the machine for well over 18 months, so I guess I've had good mileage, though Lightroom is very sluggish now. I'll try CCleaner and the defrag first.

I've got 2Gb RAM installed, would an extra 2Gb make any difference under XP?

Antelopethy · 7 Mar 2009 at 13:44

May I just point out that as far as i'm aware, avast is quite a poor antivirus, and you may be better off looking for an alternative such as AVG.
Anyway, back on topic, I think, while an extra 2 gigs of ram wouldn't be fully supported, it's so cheap nowadays that there isn't much reason not to upgrade IMO - there should definitely be some difference even in XP.

SinaiSound · 7 Mar 2009 at 13:46

Overclock it!

J.B · 7 Mar 2009 at 19:39

Antelopethy said:
May I just point out that as far as i'm aware, avast is quite a poor antivirus, and you may be better off looking for an alternative such as AVG.

Dont want to derail this thread, but do a search for best antivirus in the Windows and Software subforum, I think you'll find Avast normally makes it into the top 3

MAllen · 7 Mar 2009 at 21:26

J.B said:
Dont want to derail this thread, but do a search for best antivirus in the Windows and Software subforum, I think you'll find Avast normally makes it into the top 3

The Free AVG is pretty bloated now. It will slow things down. Buy NOD32 from eset.co.uk - it's worth it for the well built program. (There is a demo if you want to try it out first). Find a few mates who will share a licence and you can get the cost down to £15 per year each.

Clear TEMP folders out (Both %TEMP% and \Windows\Temp\). Clear your caches in your browsers. Clear out any progams you don't need. Kick MSCONFIG around. Remove those dozen extra Java installations (when Java updates, it never removes the old ones). Remove startup sounds. Look for all those annoying "autoupdate" programs like Acorbat, Java, Quicktime and bring them under control.

Most importantly - threaten PC with a large stick.