hamtronix wrote:
Just reformat and reinstall WinXP. That will cure your ills. It should be done once a year in any case to remove 'debris'
I have never - ever - done this. My current windows installation was made as Win95OSR2 in 1997 (parallel to WfW3.11), then updated somewhat later to Win98SE, then a couple of years ago to XP Pro. Of course I didn't just throw the new OS at it, I cleaned out anything system related before.
The current XP SP2 is ~2.6 GB in size which isn't too bad considering the age. I can still run ancient Corel Draw 5.0...
The most important thing is: watch out what you install and how. Don't activate 'agents', 'quick load options' and all that crap since all that stuff loading during boot and running in the background all the time (when you don't need it) can get the fastest machine down to a crawl.
I've cleaned out lots of Windoze machines from colleages, friends that had unbelievable amounts of junk in their systems. All these so called system optimizer, "we make Windows faster", memory doublers are just a bunch of crap. A lean and clean system is a fast system.
Of course you'll have to watch out for spyware and trojans as well. Don't install anything from a source you don't trust 100%, especially not anything you just downloaded from
somewhere...
And don't use
Internet Explorer. :oops:
