Cleaning up my PC....

[rendertrap]

About a year ago I decided to format my hard drive as it was getting really slow and one of my friends told me to do this and it should clear up ur registry and things should run alot faster...

I did this and yeah was faster, but after installing all the apps, it started to get slower... Now.. it takes like 5 minutes to load up.. once it passes the blue xp screen and loads up the desktop it takes ages.... I've checked to see what its openning and all i can see is nortons firewall and nortons anti virus sw....

Are they any programs or tasks which I can do to get my machine fast like it used to be....

any freeware apps to as really can't afford to buy owt...

let me know with your advise as really can't buy a new machine...

Educate me...!!!!!

[lhys09915]

norton will slow it down.
try this thread it has some usefull tip which does speedup xp.

http://www.dvdrbase.com/showthread.php?t=35731

[emailrob]

TuneXP can help boot times

http://www.driverheaven.net/dforce/

Also run msconfig from the Start, Run box and see what is loading up. You may be surprised!

[Virgin San]

A few questions - what cpu do you have and how much RAM? Norton IS greedy but shouldn't slow you down to 5 minute boot up unless your system belongs in a museum.

Do you keep your virus definitions up to date and scan regularly? Its entirely possible that you have a virus or 3 which might be slowing things down, I would suggest an online scan from a site such as Pandasoftware (http://www.pandasoftware.com/activescan/com/activescan_principal.htm) if you aren't 100% sure that your system is clean.

You could also probably do with getting rid of a bucket load of spyware - use something like Adaware (http://www.tucows.com/preview/236049.html). Don't forget to update the definitions, this is freeware.

Rather than reinstalling, you can also use a registry cleaner to tidy up your registry - something like regseeker (http://www.techdaily.ws/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1324) - freeware also.

Check out what progs you have running at startup and see if they are all necessary as suggested above by emailrob.

If, once you've done all that and you think its still slow ... you can remove Norton completely (WHILE OFFLINE!) and install a free firewall such as ZoneAlarm (http://www.zonelabs.com/store/content/company/products/znalm/freeDownload.jsp), and also some free AV software such as Antivir (http://www.free-av.com/), avast (http://www.avast.com/) or AVG (http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_dwnl_free.php).

If all of the above don't work, try whipping the hamster a bit harder :)