Whenever my 3 year old laptop starts feeling a little sluggish I decide to format the thing with a fresh OS install. To my surprise (thought it shouldn't be a surprise), it will suddenly feel new again. Unfortunately this increase in speed is short lived as I download more stuff onto my computer. So I'm wondering if partitioning my computer would lighten this problem. Currently I have 1 Big partition and put EVERYTHING on it. Would having 2 partitions alleviate this problem? The primary partition just for Windows programs and the seconds partition for All my data?

Partitioning your drive won't increase access speed. It may reduce the rate of fragmentation. Are you defragmenting regularly?

Quote: Original post by Sneftel
Partitioning your drive won't increase access speed. It may reduce the rate of fragmentation. Are you defragmenting regularly?

Yeah I'm defragmenting a lot!

Now, if there's more free space on my drive, wouldn't the access time go down? Less data to search through right?

Quote: Original post by Instigator

Quote: Original post by Sneftel
Partitioning your drive won't increase access speed. It may reduce the rate of fragmentation. Are you defragmenting regularly?

Yeah I'm defragmenting a lot!

Now, if there's more free space on my drive, wouldn't the access time go down? Less data to search through right?

Not really.

Your speed ups are far more likely to be related to you renewing the OS once its been overloaded with vampiric nonsense. Try avoiding adding anything you don't have to and nothing that isn't well known. All those little things add up chipping away at memory and boot times. You are most likely feeding your system bacon burgers and onion rings and that just isn't healthy.

Look at processes and see if anything specific is eating up lots of memory or has a high CPU load when your not using it. It even could be 1 thing you keep adding on and haven't made the connection yet. My wife's system started crawling and it turned out to be just some stupid Screen Saver that for some reason was using resources at all times even though she wasn't using it. Betting it was not just a screensaver.

You can try the HD thing but it isn't going to do anything for you that the occasional defraging wont. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think there is any real reason to defrag "a lot!"

I sugest 2 things:
1) You shouldn't defragment "a lot". You should though partition your drive up a bit. Keeping a partition for installing programs, a partition for active usage, and a partition for storage will help reduce fragmentation. That way things you use your active dive for won't fragment you installed programs. And, once you have some completed files downloaded, you copy them off, en-mass to the storage partition (very likely defrags those files, and frees up space so other downloads don't fragment too much).

2) Run msconfig and take a look at what is starting when you boot the machine. You likely just have too much random junk that thinks it needs to boot. Stuff like mouse driver control panels, adobe acrobat quickstart, quicktime's quickstart, etc. Lots of stuff that "speeds up access" to features of programs you may only use twice a month. Close it down, cause it wastes more time than it saves.

I'll following those tips thanks! I also found this application called HD Tune . This application will tell you the average read and write speed of your Drive. Using this information I determined that my drive was reading and writing at only 20MB/s average. Which is apparently 1/3 of what a new 2.5" drive will do for me. Anyways, all this to say is that I've bought a new HDD. And thanks!

I finally did a reinstall on one of my computers. The speed difference was unbelievable.
How many times in 3 years have you reinstalled?
I have an 8 year old computer, and have never done a fresh OS install. O_O

Final solution: don't use windows.
It's unbelievable how badly windows scales. Install a few programs and the performance goes down noticably. At my university, the windows machines come with any heavy-weight software you can think of - MSVS, MSOffice, MSAnything, Photoshop, 3DSMax, plus myriades of small programs. It easily takes more than 5 minutes after login, before the system is halfway responsive.
In contrast, i could throw anything at my linux without any noticable slowdown (and most distries come with a wide variety of software preinstalled).
Sooo...if you don't absolutely need MS software on your notebook you might give it a try...

Quote: Original post by maximAL
Final solution: don't use windows.

I'd amend that to "Windows when logged in as an administrator". I've found that Vista machines with UAC enabled and XP machines only used by regular users do not exhibit the gradual decline into unusability that this thread talks about.

Of course, XP is pretty much unusable when not logged in as a regular user thanks to poorly-written software assuming they have administrator rights at all times. Vista's various workarounds makes this a lot more practical.

Linux users (and programmers) are used to not being permanently logged in as root, of course. It's nice that Vista is persuading developers to catch up. [smile]

Quote: Original post by maximAL
Final solution: don't use windows.
It's unbelievable how badly windows scales. Install a few programs and the performance goes down noticably. At my university, the windows machines come with any heavy-weight software you can think of - MSVS, MSOffice, MSAnything, Photoshop, 3DSMax, plus myriades of small programs. It easily takes more than 5 minutes after login, before the system is halfway responsive.
In contrast, i could throw anything at my linux without any noticable slowdown (and most distries come with a wide variety of software preinstalled).
Sooo...if you don't absolutely need MS software on your notebook you might give it a try...

It's also worth noting that if Windows were not avoidable, as is the case for big heaping swaths of the world, then some of those pre-loaders can be disabled in one way or another. So that is always worth looking into and can help boot times.

The whole pre-load thing is ridiculous practice in most cases. You still have to suffer through the initial load times but the application manages to hide the fact that it is responsible by tossing its wait time into the startup sequence. Then you end up blaming the OS or computer for being so damn slow when it's stuck loading the 9000 programs on your computer all at once when you are only going to use 10-15 during that boot. It ends up wasting your time by eating up your resources and forcing you to suffer though a load every boot instead of every 10 or what have you.