Monday, October 11, 2004

The Tale Of The Overloaded PC

The hard drive is 93% full and 15% fragmented. Things are going slow.

It’s a HP Omnibook 4150 (366 MHz Pentium II, 128MB RAM, 4 Gigabyte hard drive) and some not-so-smarty-pants has Windows XP Professional loaded on to it. Things will never get much faster, not on this laptop PC anyway.

It comes with a CD-ROM drive, PSU, a PC-card modem with no lead and a new owner who is disturbingly innocent at times, disturbingly innocent as in: how could she have bought this.

It would have been better if the original Windows 98 was left on, it could have done very nicely, but what can you do? With no original recovery or installation disks: an OS reinstall of a machine of this type has too many risks.

First thing to do was to make space on the hard drive. There was a lot of game (CDs needed), demo, PDA and mobile phone software. There was also an install of Office XP (yip, with Windows XP and on this spec of machine). Off they all came.

Finally the previous owner's (he sold to his girlfriend's sister) account was wiped. I genuinely hope that there was nothing he wanted in there that he didn't take a copy of before hand, I could had left it but there was 3/4 of a Gig of stuff in there and most of it looked like music, Buffy, lo-res 'phone pictures and more games.

Crap Cleaner (http://www.ccleaner.com/) removed another 230 Meg. Yipped we are at 57% free hard disk.

So next I clean up the registry after all those uninstalls and deletes. To do this I just used CCleaner again, this time with Tweak Now registry cleaner (http://www.tweaknow.com/RegCleaner.html) and a trial version of Winguides Registry Mechanic (http://www.winguides.com/regmech/). I also used two trial versions of registry defragmenting programmes (http://www.acelogix.com/regcompact.html and http://www.elcor.net/rdefrag.php).

Then I thoroughly defragmented and generally sorted the hard drive out with a trial version of VoptXP (I really should buy this) from http://www.vopt.com/VoptXP.htm.

Things are running a good bit more bearably now. A quite passable performance, particularly if you don't try to do two things at once, even.

Only a few things left to do now. I can't see the point of looking for any driver updates, just be thankful it works. It looks like it has never been connected to the Internet and there are no modem leads, so I hide all the Outlook Express and IE desktop references using the Tweak UI PowerToy.

Last thing: some applications. I installed Open Office (http://www.openoffice.org/), IrfanView (http://www.irfanview.com/) and JetAudio (http://www.jetaudio.com/download/) For some reason (will it ever be used?)I also installed the GIMP (http://www.gimp.org/). The disk is still only 50% used.

I'm guessing/hoping the applications have small execution foot prints. So with regular use of CCleaner and Microsoft’s built-in disk cleaner and defragmenter this laptop will do for its light office work regime until something breaks.

I've put together a list of recommended parts for usability: USB floppy drive (CD writers are too dear)(actually a 128/256 Meg USB pen drive might be better) and USB modem (for a total of £42). Sadly a RAM upgrade is too dear (£40 or £80 for a new total of 192 or 256 Megabytes) to justify. A new PC would be the only thing really worth her spending any real money on.

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