Why does my Windows wear off over time?

[Jdbye]

As others have said here, 512mb is not enough RAM for a normal installation of XP with some modern software.
The result is that XP uses HD space regularly as virtual memory and that's why the HD seems to work extra time, drastically slowing performance.
You might have a defrag problem as well but the amount of performance increase gained from defrag is not as significant as buying more RAM.

512 MB is more than enough for XP.
Windows always gets slower over time, as you install more and more programs that clog up the windows registry.
Defragmenting can help a bit, but the only way to get it back to the speed it was at in the beginning is to reinstall windows.

Well, from my experience anyway. Reinstalling windows will take a bit of time though since you have to reinstall all the programs too (well most of them, many programs can just run from the old installation without having to reinstall it)

 

[test84]

My laptop was running extremely poorly and I got tons of blue scrrens of death. I bought it a new HDD and reinstalled XP. It ran like a dream! For a week or two that was... I wanted to upgrade from 256mb ram to 512mb more but the stupid ram I bought from Crucial slowed down my laptop big time! So I'm still running on 256mb and am gonna upgrade with real ram soon. Hopefully I'll be able to run Windows Live and my anti-virus w/o slowdowns.

the problem is, it will go slower over time, at first everything is super fast, but it will decay over time.

 

[cory1492]

You'll have to find a real defrag tool that can also defrag in use files (on reboot). I for one recommend Perfectdisk (raxco).

Clear system restore (disable then enable it again will clear it)

Check that your pagefile is set to a static size so it isn't constantly resizing it and causing more fragmentation and delays to resize it. (in case you don't know how
-right click my computer
-select properties
-select the advanced tab
-select the settings button for performance
-select the advanced tab again
-select change for the virtual memory section
-pick custom size and put in 2.5 times your memory for both min and max (1280 for 512M memory)
-defrag system files, or find a way to clear the page file on your next boot (should only need to do that once)

Should see an increase in performance, how much I don't know.

Also worth mentioning, Windows Live sucks. For me, it eats up a tonne of space for a usrjrnl file that has something to do with the folder sharing thing - last time I ran it it created a 2.5GiB jrnl with more than 44,000 fragments that did indeed slow my PC down (with 1.2G of memory, no less); I found no way to defrag it, only recourse was killing live and issuing some sys maintenance commands to clear the journal. The only way to tell if this is affecting you that I know of is to mess with the "system volume information" hidden folder's permissions so you can see how big the contents of the volume info folder is (or use a defragger that can check $MST and similar files for you). It shouldn't be much more than what you set system restore size to for that drive.

That about kills my list for suggestions, aside from getting more complex. Been able to maintain a 768MiB RAM system with a 1.9GHz AMD with no noticeable slowdowns for nearly 2 years now (though I get the occasional doctor watson crash, some dwwin.exe dll load issue).

 

[test84]

thnx Cory (taylor? Slipknot?).
defragging the in use file was a smart one, but i cant download that program, i'm on dial up, try to download it somehow.

 

[Takrin]

yea it gets quite annoying. what i used to do is format everytime i feel i've reached a all time low and i was too lazy to defrag hehe. slow performance is also due to installed programs also, if they run on background.

or perhaps technology is catching up to you, time to dish out some money to buy a new pc? but thats kinda rare but i've seen people use pc under 400mhz as desktop wanting to install windows xp.

 

[Urza]

I'm a proponent of regular formats. Every 4 months at the maximum.

do a fresh install of your os, add all the progs you want, then make an image of your system and back that up - then all you have to do is apply that image everytime you need to start a fresh

 

[rest0re]

Hi,
Whats with windows? i'm not that noob at windows and i know they decay over time but its getting so bad since i dont install more programs and my system shows that i have free RAM still, my HDD works a ton and its obvious that my performance decreases alot.

why is that? tested with spyware and viruses already.

and it was same softwares that i installed on first day and performance was great, but now, its like shit.

its a Centrino Core Duo 1.6, 512mg ram, win xp sp2 (it was SP1, i updated to SP2)

data is fragmented around hdd. do defragmentation and it will help. it will put data back in order...

 

[test84]

used Perfect disk and its offline mode, didnt help.
i got a little improvement but still HDD works excessively, gonna format and install again.

 

[paolo90]

I suggest you install Windows on a separate HDD partition from your program files and user files. I personally have my "My Documents" located on a different partition from the Windows partition, and I have a separate HDD dedicated for my downloads. If there's one thing about Windows, it's that you need to have planning before you install it, or else it'll slow down in time. I've been using this method for about 5 years now, and the only time I had to reinstall was when I upgraded to Vista.

About RAM, the RAM you need is really dependent on the programs you run and your multi-tasking habits. I think 512mb is more than enough for a normal XP user, and 1gb for a normal Vista user (Yes, I don't think it's 2gb). I personally have 1.5gb for my Vista and I don't run out of RAM even when I have Photoshop, Vegas, and After Effects running all at the same time.