DISQUS

Rahul Gaitonde: HOWTO: Speed up XP and Vista, reclaim disk space, tweak performance

  • lopez · 1 year ago
    These are cool tips. Not tried Windirstat. I use CCleaner regularly to cleanout the crap. For defrag i prefer to set it automatically in the background. I also do a boot defrag with my third party defragmenter. it really helps increase the file access speed and smooth performance.
  • Rahul Gaitonde · 1 year ago
    Lopez, what boot defragmenter do you use?
  • lopez · 1 year ago
    Hi Rahul, I tried demo versions of some of the popular defraggers in the market before settling for Diskeeper.
  • Ayaz · 1 year ago
    Hey Rahul,
    I was wondering if you could help me with my problem.
    While partitioning my primary hard disk (C) on Windows Vista (Home Premium), I stopped it midway...! Now I have lost the 10GB space that I was trying to partition - It is neither in Drive C/D nor as "Unpartitioned Space"!

    Any idea about this?
  • Rahul Gaitonde · 1 year ago
    @Ayaz - will send an email to your Yahoo! account shortly.
  • doncerdo · 1 year ago
    Good guide, but for the longest time I have yet see a reason to defrag (amount of time it takes vs. the improvement as almost all the time its barely perceptible). My other critisism, since when is Open Office a lite application? Last time I checked it was slower than the historically slowest version of MS Office (2003 and 2007 are probably the fastest and most responsive of all time). Its cool to recommend solutions, but just because one doesn't like program/company one has to recommend something thats worse.

    Cheers
  • Rahul Gaitonde · 1 year ago
    Doncerdo, glad you liked the guide.

    1.) Re: defrag, I have experienced a perceptible difference while opening files and launching applications whenever I've run defrag. Perhaps this is because I have little free space on my C: drive.

    2.) Re: Openoffice, it is definitely lighter than Office in terms of occupied disk space, and is speedier than Office 2007 on even slightly older PCs and notebooks. (I'm aware that older releases of OO.org crawled miserably).

    3.) There is no bias towards/against any company on this blog.
  • Sushil · 1 year ago
    Good guide, it covers almost everything that i do. Except for the WinDirStat utility. Since i check the decrease in disk space after installing any software, things like MSOcache are not an issue.

    I would like to add a point. Like the username/local settings/temp in XP, which regularly accumulates junk...Vista too has a User Temp folder. Which is accessible by typing "%temp%" in RUN. CCleaner does the job and its really good (no doubt), but just incase someone avoids such cleaners...like me!

    Also, since you have suggested to Turn Off system restore (i too have done that)....you should suggest another backup solution! Its way too risky otherwise!

    The following are the options:

    -Vista Ultimate's Complete PC Backup
    -Norton Ghost/ Acronis Tru Image (Paid)
    -Opensource Disk Imaging Utilities

    Sushil.
  • nk3371 · 1 year ago
    that CCleaner really awesome...
    get a 1.4Gb back for my C drive...