After I picked up my Daughter from her Grandparents house yesterday (where they were making "the best chocolate chip cookies; might have been if the bottoms had not been a bit burned, but still good) I headed over to the X's where she had been having abysmal PC performance
After 15 minutes from booting you might get some response form the system....might....
She has 768K DSL service.....I clocked her system at about 40K (less than a good dial up modem).
It's an older PC running Windows 2000, but, when I left it was purring like a kitten and seeing an average 1.2 mbps download rate!
Lesson to be learned here; your PC is not passive like a TV......it's like a car, it needs to be taken care of and like a child cleaned up after.
SO! What did these four hours encompass? How was this miracle of improved (vastly, incredibly improved!) performance attained!!??
Briefly there were about 12,000 temporary files (NOT including Internet Explorer temporary files!), about half a gigaybte of Internet Explorer temporary files, about 1000 invalid registry keys, and when I ran a disk fragmentation analysis, the whole thing was blood red with fragmentation. Thousands of fragments. Compound this by the fact that there was very little free space on the system (under 100 megabytes) it was literally in its death throes. This is also compounded by the fact that there is an account the kids can use on her PC.
SO, I killed all the temp files, flushed Internet Explorer caches, repaired the registry and defragmented the disk. Now the system is flying. The system has other issues, such as it will not recognize any CD-ROM drive (even a USB external drive, which made using the CD full of tools I brought useless! I ended up having my son suck the PC onto his USB memory device and moving the files that way), but, if it is good enough for the X to do her work and my daughter to play on Mom's PC, then it was four hours well spent.
As the X was at an appointment around 6PM I gave Christopher money so he could zip off to Quizno's and get their Monday three large subs for a decent .vs. the super-inflated normal price deal.......he took advantage though and also brought them treats. I flagged him on that and mentioned I had not had them bring me anything to save some money and he kind of blew it by buying snacks for everyone, and not to do so without permission in the future.
Anyway, after that I headed home to about 120 work emails and after that watched a couple of Walker Texas Ranger episodes off the DVR before retiring. I did have a nice surpise, my friends Suresh and Indu had sent me a 'care package' from New York, some spicy Indian Snacks and some hot Chili powder! The majority of this bounty shall be saved for my birthday early next month!
After 15 minutes from booting you might get some response form the system....might....
She has 768K DSL service.....I clocked her system at about 40K (less than a good dial up modem).
It's an older PC running Windows 2000, but, when I left it was purring like a kitten and seeing an average 1.2 mbps download rate!
Lesson to be learned here; your PC is not passive like a TV......it's like a car, it needs to be taken care of and like a child cleaned up after.
SO! What did these four hours encompass? How was this miracle of improved (vastly, incredibly improved!) performance attained!!??
Briefly there were about 12,000 temporary files (NOT including Internet Explorer temporary files!), about half a gigaybte of Internet Explorer temporary files, about 1000 invalid registry keys, and when I ran a disk fragmentation analysis, the whole thing was blood red with fragmentation. Thousands of fragments. Compound this by the fact that there was very little free space on the system (under 100 megabytes) it was literally in its death throes. This is also compounded by the fact that there is an account the kids can use on her PC.
SO, I killed all the temp files, flushed Internet Explorer caches, repaired the registry and defragmented the disk. Now the system is flying. The system has other issues, such as it will not recognize any CD-ROM drive (even a USB external drive, which made using the CD full of tools I brought useless! I ended up having my son suck the PC onto his USB memory device and moving the files that way), but, if it is good enough for the X to do her work and my daughter to play on Mom's PC, then it was four hours well spent.
As the X was at an appointment around 6PM I gave Christopher money so he could zip off to Quizno's and get their Monday three large subs for a decent .vs. the super-inflated normal price deal.......he took advantage though and also brought them treats. I flagged him on that and mentioned I had not had them bring me anything to save some money and he kind of blew it by buying snacks for everyone, and not to do so without permission in the future.
Anyway, after that I headed home to about 120 work emails and after that watched a couple of Walker Texas Ranger episodes off the DVR before retiring. I did have a nice surpise, my friends Suresh and Indu had sent me a 'care package' from New York, some spicy Indian Snacks and some hot Chili powder! The majority of this bounty shall be saved for my birthday early next month!
2 comments:
Chris,
Yikes! That is one of the worst cases of computer neglect of which I have heard!
It is amazing how people neglect their systems.
- David
The X is very smart except in the care and feeding of a PC.....oh well, being a fool and in love with her I can refuse no request that does not break the law or involve barnyard animals!
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