LVSteve
Member
The thread started by Snowman http://smith-wessonforum.com/lounge/340530-software-question-one-tech-challenged.html got me thinking about the state of my older computer. By "older" I mean it survived the impact that took out the dinosaurs as it is a 700 MHz Pentium III.
I checked out the online reviews of the free registry cleaners and downloaded two of them, CCleaner and the registry cleaner from Auslogics. I use the Auslogics defragger and it is a good piece of software.
So, rule one before starting any of this is to set up a restore point on your computer. Guess what, the Restore function was totally AWOL. After some fiddling around I got it going again from the XP Service Pack 3 software downloaded ages ago. I have no clue how long the restore function has been dead.
One other really interesting thing came to light while I was rooting around trying to get the Restore to work. I had the computer set to allow remote control.
That may have happened during the XP upgrade period or when I had problems with Norton a while back. It's off now.
After sorting that out, I got to work with the registry cleaners. It is interesting to note that they did not always find all the same things wrong, but for sure there was a LOT of clutter and software dead ends lurking on this machine. I'm not too surprised as it was a Windows 98SE box that was upgraded to XP some years ago. I am certain there was a lot of loose ends left by that process as Microsoft Support had to finish the job for me. So, I got brave and let the cleaners kill all the stuff they found.
With great trepidation I shutdown the machine entirely then switched it back on. WOW, it worked. PHEW! But, has the clear out had any obvious effect? Yes, boot up is a little quicker and scrolling up and down webpages is definitely smoother. The latter is a big surprise and just shows how junk on the machine can gum up the works, probably in the video drivers.
Good luck to all who try similar stuff on their computers.
I checked out the online reviews of the free registry cleaners and downloaded two of them, CCleaner and the registry cleaner from Auslogics. I use the Auslogics defragger and it is a good piece of software.
So, rule one before starting any of this is to set up a restore point on your computer. Guess what, the Restore function was totally AWOL. After some fiddling around I got it going again from the XP Service Pack 3 software downloaded ages ago. I have no clue how long the restore function has been dead.
One other really interesting thing came to light while I was rooting around trying to get the Restore to work. I had the computer set to allow remote control.
That may have happened during the XP upgrade period or when I had problems with Norton a while back. It's off now.After sorting that out, I got to work with the registry cleaners. It is interesting to note that they did not always find all the same things wrong, but for sure there was a LOT of clutter and software dead ends lurking on this machine. I'm not too surprised as it was a Windows 98SE box that was upgraded to XP some years ago. I am certain there was a lot of loose ends left by that process as Microsoft Support had to finish the job for me. So, I got brave and let the cleaners kill all the stuff they found.
With great trepidation I shutdown the machine entirely then switched it back on. WOW, it worked. PHEW! But, has the clear out had any obvious effect? Yes, boot up is a little quicker and scrolling up and down webpages is definitely smoother. The latter is a big surprise and just shows how junk on the machine can gum up the works, probably in the video drivers.
Good luck to all who try similar stuff on their computers.
