Slow or Not too Slow

On my last semi-annual visit to my parent's house* my mother mentioned her computer -- a very nice graphics workstation with lots of memory and storage -- has been slowing down over time. With my background the first thing that came to mind was "this is a typical Windows design flaw. Time to reinstall and everything will be faster." But then I remembered her machine was running XP, and, in spite of my philosophic differences with the Microsoft Corporation, XP has shown itself to be a fairly stable operating platform (with proper care and feeding). Granted there are things like viruses and their ilk or hardware problems that can make a system slow, but barring these things the question centers around a cause that is just a part of running the system over time.

It turns out to be (not so surprisingly) difficult to diagnose a problem given a vague symptom. Operating on the assumption there is no virus or hardware problem, there seem to be three common candidates for cause. The first is the standard file system fragmentation. The second is process overload, of which system tray crowding is a symptom. The final common culprit is also the most ephemeral: perception -- is your machine really slower than when you first started using it, or have your expectations of how fast it should be changed?

So the file fragmentation issue is probably the easiest to cure. In fact there are several things one should routinely do for a healthy system.

The next step is to see if there is stuff running that really isn't needed. This can get very tricky, very quickly. The most obvious thing is to uninstall any programs you don't actually use. Most of us, however, are pretty sure that everything on that list of installed programs belongs there. No one can help you if you are a pack rat.

Even when we install programs we actually use, there are certain things that get set to run in the background that have questionable value (think of all those "quick-start" icons that end up in the systray). There is a post at Microsoft that has some detail about cleaning up background programs (after of course a discussion on defragmentation). Please note that setting certain things not to run, done incorrectly, can lead to your system not working. The post I mentioned links to this site which seems to have a fairly comprehensive list of programs (along with DLL's) and what they actually do. (I feel the need at this point to state that unless I come to your house and do the clicking, any computer breakage is your fault, not mine.)

Another interesting possibility I ran across in researching this issue is there are too many fonts installed (be sure and read the updated article for even more information on performance and other processes). You heard me; fonts. Evidently having thousands of fonts installed in XP will slow it down. Who knew. If you have too many fonts installed on your computer, your homework assignment** is to see if there is a way to access them without actually having them installed.

The perceptual issue is probably the hardest to address. Unless one is OCD about timing how long the computer takes to do certain tasks, there will generally be no record regarding historical performance.

So I guess the upshot of all this is that your computer, like any other workspace, should be cleaned and maintained on a regular basis. If not, the gremlins of clutter will do . . . well . . . they'll do what the gremlins of clutter do. You have been warned.***

-----------------------------------------------------
* Hi mom, we'll be there for Thanksgiving.
** Do your own damn research.
*** None of this of course covers infection by viruses and their ilk, or hardware failures.