Why is Windows XP slow?
How long do you sit at your computer waiting for it to start up? How long does it take to start a program or even surf the web? If you can start your computer, go off and make yourself a cup of coffee, come back, and the computer still hasn't finished loading up, then something is seriously wrong. The good news is that you can do something that's easy, quick and will make such a big difference to the speed of your computer, you'll wish you had done it ages ago.
The main reason why Windows XP gets really slow, is because it has a thing called a registry. The registry is like a phonebook for your computer. Every time your computer needs to do something like start a program, for example, after you've clicked on it, Windows XP will go to the registry (the phonebook) and look up the program that you clicked on (a person's name) and see what it should do next (the person's phone number).
Things tend to get bad as time goes on because the registry gets bigger when you install / remove programs, meaning that it takes longer to find things (just as it would with a bigger phonebook). Things get especially bad when you remove programs because when you remove the program, it may not remove all traces from the registry, causing invalid or corrupt entries to be left in the registry. This is like looking up a person's name in the phonebook and calling the telephone number listed, but the number has been disconnected.
What Can You Do About It?
With Windows XP slow, you'll need to do 3 things at the very least to get your computer working at a faster speed.
How long do you sit at your computer waiting for it to start up? How long does it take to start a program or even surf the web? If you can start your computer, go off and make yourself a cup of coffee, come back, and the computer still hasn't finished loading up, then something is seriously wrong. The good news is that you can do something that's easy, quick and will make such a big difference to the speed of your computer, you'll wish you had done it ages ago.
The main reason why Windows XP gets really slow, is because it has a thing called a registry. The registry is like a phonebook for your computer. Every time your computer needs to do something like start a program, for example, after you've clicked on it, Windows XP will go to the registry (the phonebook) and look up the program that you clicked on (a person's name) and see what it should do next (the person's phone number).
Things tend to get bad as time goes on because the registry gets bigger when you install / remove programs, meaning that it takes longer to find things (just as it would with a bigger phonebook). Things get especially bad when you remove programs because when you remove the program, it may not remove all traces from the registry, causing invalid or corrupt entries to be left in the registry. This is like looking up a person's name in the phonebook and calling the telephone number listed, but the number has been disconnected.
What Can You Do About It?
With Windows XP slow, you'll need to do 3 things at the very least to get your computer working at a faster speed.
- Remove the programs you don't use anymore - they're just taking up room and making things harder to find for your computer.
- Defragment the hard drive (the program's already installed) - over time, things get spread out all over your hard drive, when you defragment, it's like putting the files back in order to make searching for them easier.
- Clean up your registry - the most important of the 3. And hopefully, you should know why now. Get yourself a good registry cleaner. Avoid the freebies, like everything else in life, you get what you pay for.
If you're not sure which registry cleaner will help speed up your computer, check out my latest reviews here: http://xpslow.org/why-is-xp-slow/
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