Hey, I'm Dave, welcome to my shop! I'm Dave Plummer, a retired operating systems
engineer from Microsoft going back to the MS-DOS and Windows 95 days.
I worked on pretty much every operating system at Microsoft from MS-DOS through Sever 2003,
and today I'm going to explain not only why it is that your computer slows down as it ages, but also
the Top 5 things that you can do to fix it right now. I figure there are two scenarios that bring
you to this point. Either you're contending with some ancient piece of iron yourself,
or to deploy into some secondary capacity in your home lab. The other, perhaps more likely
possibility is that you've taken mercy upon one of your relatives who is using an older computer
where the performance can best be measured on a geological timescale. But is there actually
anything you can do about it? The answer is yes, there are actually several things that can and
should be done, and we'll cover them all today! You might think its unavoidable, but it's actually
a ciumulative process that happens over time, and it's at least mostly reversible. That means you
can usually correct a lot of the slowdown problems with the Top 5 Tips I'll share with you today.
Now you might think that I would only have the latest and greatest hardware for myself,
and that vendors and manufacturers constantly shower me with the best of the best.
And if my main desktop is in fact a Mac Ultra Studio connected to a Threadripper rocking 128
gigs of RAM, you might find it hard to muster any sympathy for me whatsoever. And that's fine.
But don't worry about me. Think of the children. Specifically, think of MY children!
That's because our house is equipped with what is known as The Craft Room. It's almost like a tiny
classroom in that each kid has a little locker and then a desk area reserved at the big counter.
The whole area is overlooked by mom's desk, and perhaps one of the best decisions we ever
made was to make this room the central point of most all family activity in the house.
We did this by putting each kid's computer down here instead of in their room.
This also allowed us the ability to at least keep an eye on what the kids are spending most
of their time on, though of course they all have iPads and phone as well, so it's not exclusive.
When I initially built out this space with computers for the kids, I knew I didn't want
a bunch of PC boxes sitting up on top. I really wanted the elegance, uniformity,
and simplicity of the iMac hardware, but I was a loyal Microsoft employee, so.... As a result,
I wound up buying iMacs, wiping them, and then using Bootcamp to install the latest
and greatest version of Windows onto the Apple hardware. To me, it was the best of both worlds!
But there is one fatal flaw with the iMac, being that when the computer ages, you've still got a
big investment in the display, which is still perfectly fine, after all. No one is going to
throw away a perfectly fine 27" 4K or 5K monitor, but other than RAM you're very much locked into
the iPad's CPU and other hardware. As a result, I think a lot of people, myself included, persist in
using iMacs with base hardware specs that we'd otherwise haul off to PC Recycle if not for the
expensive display. And so, I've become a bit of an expert at extending the life of older machines.
Before we can fix any of it, though, we first need to understand why the computer slows down with
age. Now clearly, the hardware's not actually getting any slower, as components to not slow down
with age, and unlike the unbridled raw speed you experience while that new-computer smell is still
fresh, the slowdown that's been happening since is probably not just in your head.
Just to get it out of the way, because it's Something that CAN happen, however,
which would be clogged vents, fans, or heat syncs that wind up causing premature thermal throttling.
That's about the only real way I can imagine hardware performance varying with age. Software,
though, is a completely different story. But why? The major reason is that software installations,
and in particular the alternating or rotating installation and removal of games and software, is
that they cause the amount of code that the system has to execute to grow and bloat and that strains
the resources of the machine in a way it did not when it was new. And the real problem is that
sometimes, if you double the load on PC it might become 4 times slower, as it's not always linear.
For example, if you need 16G on a machine that has only 8G, it must instead use extremely slow,
disc-based virtual memory instead, and that is orders of magnitude slower than direct memory
access. And conversely that is why sometimes a small change can have a big impact on perf.
#1 - Removing Unused Applications and Games It seems simple, because it is: go into the control
panel and remove any applications that you're not using. You should also be judicious about what
you install on your machine if it's not something you want to become part of your permanent toolset;
consider evaluating games and utilities in a VM if possible. Not all game systems are created
equally - perhaps it's entirely fine to check out and remove and reinstall dozens of games with a
system like Steam but its less so if those games are also partying all over the system registry.
Speaking of which, the registry is one reason why it's important to use the
uninstaller for an application. If written correctly, and that's anything but a given,
the uninstaller will remove not only the files and folders that it created during the original
installation but also things like fonts and entries in the system registry database.
Uninstalling a large and complex application can clean out a large swath of registry debris.
There are programs that claim to be able to do registry repair and cleaning after the fact but
doing it well and safely is not trivial. Better to use the application's proper uninstaller.
One thing you may not have considered is that if you have a computer that's 8 years old,
you're likely not still running all 8-year-old software on it. Odds are you've upgraded your
software along the way and that those newer versions have grown in size and resource demands.
So, in that sense, your computer hasn't really gotten any slower, you're just asking something
different of it, and the performance that results is terrible. There are other perceptual changes
that also might come about, such as perhaps you get the new iPhone that responds quite promptly.
If you then go to use a desktop application and it responds more slowly than your phone does,
it will feel even slower by comparison, even if nothing has actually changed on the computer.
But let's say you've ruled out simple perceptual changes, and that your computer really is getting
slower. What can you do about it? Well, the first thing might seem so minor that you overlook it,
but it's actually very important: you always keep your computer up to date with the latest
operating system and application patches and updates. Certainly, operating systems can and
do grow significantly from one major version to next, but my experience was been that they'd
actually get faster within minor versions along the way. For example, Win95 OSR2 was faster than
the original Windows 95. At the same tasks, XP was faster than NT4 which was faster than 3.51
which was faster than 3.5 which had already been a big improvement over 3.1. How can that be? Well,
I can't prove it, but what I saw from inside the industry was that we'd add features on the major
version increments and then fix bugs and improve performance for the minor version increments.
And it just makes sense - new operating systems are sold on new features. As a result, first
you get the features, then we make them fast. But you can't always do both from the outset.
This is also true of drivers, particularly graphics drivers. They are constantly evolving
and being tweaked. And since many drivers are unified across a wide array of hardware,
perhaps your 1070GTX will pick up a feature or some perf in the release of the new Nvidia
drivers even years later. The same can be true for new releases of things like DirectX.
And because the release dates of operating systems, drivers, SDKs, and updates are staggered,
the best thing you can do is to just keep everything up to date with the latest versions of
stable platforms. After that, however, we can start to get more proactive and actually undo
some of the performance degradation. One of the first things we need to check is to see
what programs are starting automatically with Windows. Everything that runs during
startup will by definition slow your startup down, and those things that continue running
after startup will become a permanent part of the base load of the machine.
One of the most important statistics about Windows is the total working set. That is the sum total of
all the memory that the operating sytems and application have asked for at any one time.
Of course that total may exceed the amount of physical memory you have, and as noted earlier,
once pushed to start using virtual memory to make up for the shortfall, performance craters.
Adding RAM to your system, if possible, would be one solution. For an even easier solution,
just say hello to my little friend, Task Manager. I wrote the original Task Manager because I was
curious about these kinds of statistics on my own machine and how to tweak and optimize it.
And one of the key features of Task Manager is its ability to manage the list of programs that
are started automatically with Windows when the desktop starts. Switch to the Startup tab
of Task Manager to access and modify the list. One nice feature here is that you can disable an
entry without removing it entirely. That allows you test that every still works properly when
you've turned off a startup application. But what can you turn off? Generally, I'd suggest turning
off only those things that you're certain you know what they do and that you do not need them.
Perhaps there are larger programs like Skype that are starting in the background each time.
If you never need to receive calls, or don't use Skype at all, go ahead and turn it off.
If you're unsure, I suggest that you don't turn it off. If you must, turn off one thing at a time,
reboot and test for any problems. Don't delete the entries entirely, just disable their checkbox.
By the way, if you're on some seriously older software like Windows 7, this feature wasn't
in Task Manager yet so you'll need to use a program supplied with Windows called msconfig
to do much the same thing. Next, we have hard disk problems. A number of the things I'll talk
about in this section only apply to magnetic media and not SSDs, but some things, like bloated and
abandoned temporary files, seemingly never change. Let's go through the list. Mechanical drives
suffer from file fragmentation over time, which means one file is forced to be scattered around
the hard drive, so the heads have to jump and move around even to read a single linear file, because
there just wasn't enough room to store that file linearly on disk. In the old days you'd fix this
with a defrag, though it's much less important with NTFS than it was with the FAT filesystems.
I've heard some folks, including other well-known YouTube creators, make the claim that as computers
age they're forced to grow the hard drive storage into areas where the actual media on
the platter has a lower angular velocity in terms of rotational speed. They argue that the speed of
the media under the drive head is going to be much faster at the outer edges than the inner tracks,
and that this results in slower disk transfers. It's an interesting theory, but ignores the fact
that almost all magnetic computer media uses what's known as constant angular velocity.
Regardless of where the heads are, the platter is always rotating at the same speed. The heads still
read and write bits at the same timing as before, and so the bits don't actually come in any faster:
instead, they are spread further apart. That's why hard disk geometry is quoted in bytes per sector,
sectors per track, and heads per track. The sectors per track number stays constant in most
conventional media. Modern drives effectively use a monolithic block count and index and abstract
the real geometry away from you, but I could not locate any drives with variable geometry offhand.
If you know of any, please let me know in the comments! It's also pretty common for disk
formats to store the directory and file allocation information in the middle of the disk. If the
outside edge of the media were significantly faster, it's a safe bet that that's where the
filesystem authors would have stored their most important info, but it's just not the case.
Now, it's worth noting that sectors per track was actually variable in some floppy disc formats,
like the Apple II and Commodore, where they pack additional sectors into the outer tracks.
Next we have the simple tasks of temporary files and junk that can clutter up your machine,
an that brings us to an essential program for your system maintenance is named WinDirStat.
It's an open-source GPL app that scans your system to build a map of how every byte on
your disk is used. Files are grouped by location and colored by type so with a little practice
you should be able to spot both single large files and large groups of small files. Either should be
investigated to determine if it's something you can remove. Don't delete anything you're not sure
about, and don't delete anything until you're certain you've got a working system backup.
Some things, like simply emptying the recycle bin, are pretty low risk but don't just start
nuking large files that you're not familiar with! For example, in the root folder of your boot drive
there very well might a file hiberfile.sys, and it takes up gigabytes of space, but don't delete it.
Now, like me, you might say "But I've never used hibernate in my life and don't plan to start!".
If that's the case, you should use the power cfg /hibernate option to disable the feature, which
will in turn remote the file. Let's take a quick look: mine is 27 gigabytes in size. That's huge!
But if I run powercfg and turn hibernate off, it's gone and I get the 27 gigabytes of space back.
That alone could be worth the price of admission to this video, so you're welcome!
The other big one is pagefile.sys, and it's pretty much required. However, if you have more than one
drive, you can move it to a different drive, and it's something I would recommend doing if you have
a drive that's faster than your boot volume or if you're pressed for space on that boot volume. The
only problem is that they've seriously buried the setting! It's not available in the new settings
UI and keeps getting pushed further and further into the murky depths of the old UI. To get there,
we start at System. Next we select Advances System Settings. Oh, but were' not even close.
We next go to the Advanced tab and click on the button in the Performance Settings section.
From there we click on the Advanced tab yet again, then virtual memory, and finally,
we select change. Now as I said you need to have a paging file but where it lives is up to you.
If you wish to move yours to another drive here, I suggest that you create a system-managed pagefile
on the desired drive and then remove the original system-managed one on the boot drive.
It won't take effect until you restart the system.
Your next step, and don't assume it's not important, is scanning for viruses and malware.
It's not so much that the virus itself actually consumes very much in terms of resources, but
malicious code might very well install software that harvests your PC resources to become a
spambot or crypto-mining zombie, either of which will definitely slow things down.
Your most precious PC resources like RAM and CPU will be used for nefarious purposes and therefore
not available for your own use! There are tons of antivirus programs out there, but I'm going
to put a stick in the ground here and say that all you really need is Microsoft Defender. They've got
their top people on it, and I know that for a fact because the guy that runs dev for it used to work
for me, and he's really good. I trust them with my security, and you likely should as well. After
all, the Defender team is not selling anything and they're trying to bolster the security image
of Windows. It's a win/win when your interests are that closely aligned and no money changes hands!
It's worth your time to check two things on your disk: run a chkdsk to scan for errors.
You CAN supply the /F option to ask it to automatically fix anything it finds wrong,
but I prefer to do a separate scan pass first so I know what my options are.
You can also run the system file scanner, sfc /scannow, which will test, validate, and repair
any system files that may have been replaced by unofficial, and potentially buggy or slow,
third party replacements. With your system fully updated, cleaned of junk files and malware, fully
tuned and optimized for disk space, your system is about as fast as it can be. Your much more
drastic alternative is to clean-format the machine and reinstall Windows, but that's a significant
investment of your time. In some rare cases of a machine where the software installations or
configurations have been damaged extensively, it might still be your best option and last resort!
If along the way you found today's episode to be any combination of entertaining or informative,
I'd be honored if you'd consider leaving a like and subscribing to my channel.
If you have any interest in matters related to Autism, Asperger's, or ASD,
please check out my book on Amazon, Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire. It's got nothing
to do with money and everything to do with living a successful life on the spectrum.
It's everything I know now that I wish I'd known back then. Remember I'm mostly in this
for the subs and likes, so please be sure to leave me one of each before you go today.
In the meantime, and in between time, I hope to see you next time, right here in Dave's Garage.