So my mum brought her laptop over last night and asked if I can do anything about the fact it runs noticably slower than it did when she got it. It's a low end Toshiba running Vista Home Premium.
When she got it I went through and uninstalled most of the OEM-ed crap that came on it and it ran fine. While there are a few extra things installed now there's not enough to account for the impact.
My feeling is that rather than it being a specific issue this is the inevitable Windows performance degredation over time.
I've used Windows in one form or another since 3.1 but have never really understood why this is or how to prevent or treat it.
Can anyone tell me why it happens and, critically, whether there is anything (short of a full reinstall) I can do about it – either preventative or a cure?
(And I've tried selling her on another OS but she's 65 and for now wants to stick with what she knows, particularly when she's only had 9 months use out of a machine).
Best Answer
Not an explanation of why this slowdown happens, but you might be interested in Raxco's PerfectDisk (it is payware, but there's a 30-day free trial available). It's a 3rd party defragging tool, but it goes the additional step of re-ordering your files on disk according to how frequently they're accessed.
This worked wonders for my aging XP desktop, quite tangibly increasing responsiveness on initial boot and when launching applications. The most obvious changes was that previously on boot I'd arrive at the XP Welcome screen, only to have to wait between 10 and 30 seconds before the login prompt became available. Afterwards that wait was down to 1 or 2 seconds.
The tool has other bells and whistles (scheduling etc.), but I recommend it to friends and family based purely on the SmartPlacement stuff. IMHO its worth using the trial version to do a full SmartPlacement pass, even if you never use it again!