Could system be slowed down by photos? - RV-Dreams Community Forum

gypsy97 · RV-Dreams Family Member

Could system be slowed down by photos?

Froggi · RV-Dreams Family Member

If you are truly storing the photo folders on your desktop, then that can contribute. It's better to store the folders inside you pictures or my documents folders, then create shortcuts to them and place that on your desktop. Other than that, sounds like you're doing a lot of good things to clean up your computer.

Oh, and you can use start/run and type in &temp& and you will see a list of temporary files that can be deleted. Then empty your recycle bin and defrag again.

NorCal Dan · RV-Dreams Family Member

Hopefully you have anti-virus software installed on your computer and it's up-to-date.

gypsy97 · RV-Dreams Family Member

Thanks Froggi, I will follow your suggestions. Before I started fulltiming I was very much into genealogy and have loads of folders on my desktop with family pictures. It seemed like a good idea at the time because I was referring to them constantly, but now I should put them away somewhere. I'm thinking about buying yet another flash drive and just moving them entirely.

Dan, I use Avast anti-virus software, and it is updated daily.

gypsy

NorCal Dan · RV-Dreams Family Member

Depending on what OS your running you may need to defrag the registry before you see any improvement, but it would require additional software. Another area of concern is spyware BOT's. If your not running anti-spybot software you might want to consider adding that to your security arsenal.

I would recommend you store your pictures on CD or DVD, especially if you don't want to lose them to a hard drive failure. Flash drives are ok for short term storage or transport but I would never use it for permanent storage.

gypsy97 · RV-Dreams Family Member

NorCal Dan wrote:
I would recommend you store your pictures on CD or DVD, especially if you don't want to lose them to a hard drive failure. Flash drives are ok for short term storage or transport but I would never use it for permanent storage.

Thanks Dan, I think I will try getting my photos off the computer and into a permanent storage device. Can I ask why the flash drive wouldn't be good for that purpose? I would have thought just the opposite, but then, that's probably due to advertising hype.

gypsy

RVDude · RV-Dreams Family Member

What processor do you have?
How much RAM or memory do you have? (my guess is this is not sufficient)
What OS are you running?
All above can be gotten from right-click "my computer" and selecting "properties"
"my computer" is either on your desktop or in the "start" menu.

I've got about a terabyte of photos/video on my now 5+ year old computer. It's not the photos, it's something else. With practically every OS and application update more and more "features" are added perhaps straining the very basic hardware you are running. Since you have defrag'ed speed will have little to do with number/volume of files on your drive(s).

RVDude · RV-Dreams Family Member

Flash drives are still an "electronic" device and subject to loss issues (static, error on insertion, circuit failure, etc.).

You don't need to get the stuff off your hard drive, but you should have it backed up (copied) elsewhere. I would further advise that these backups/copies are not stored in the same location as the 'puter itself but geographically somewhere else. Fire and theft has a far reach.

CD/DVD have potentially a shelf life of a decade or so - highly variable. Since no generally available media is truly "permanent", you would be advised to refresh (copy onto a new disc) all your "permanent" media every 10 years or so.

There are lots of online storage options available now too. Having your pics online is a viable safe storage option, especially if it is at a specific online backup site. But just having the pics all on a photo sharing site is also a backup, you just hope they will follow prudent backup procedures there as well.

-- Edited by RVDude on Wednesday 8th of April 2009 10:12:33 AM

gypsy97 · RV-Dreams Family Member

My operating system is Windows XP, Ver. 2002, Ser. Pack 3. It has 2.00 GH 448 MB RAM. I didn't see anything about a processor.

gypsy

RVDude · RV-Dreams Family Member

448 MB RAM - Therein lies your main problem....

The computing world around you (the demands on your system) has grown way far faster than your hardware. I'd first up the RAM to the max. I can not more highly recommend the memory chip industry leader www.crucial.com in terms of assessing how much your computer can handle (they have a tool that does that automatically) and then buying the RAM from them on the super cheap, and even video of how to DIY.

2.00 GH - this is problem number 2.

You have a rather old computer/processor. The modern web has (unfortunately for us slow to upgrade folks like even me) far outgrown our processor and there is nothing we can do about it. This can only be solved with a new computer.

-- Edited by RVDude on Wednesday 8th of April 2009 10:24:56 AM

bjoyce · RV-Dreams Family Member

You can run Start->All Programs->Accessories->System Tools->System Information to get the processor specifics though they will read cryptically. What kind of processor you have makes a big difference since a Pentium 4 at 2.00GHz is much less powerful than the Core 2 Duo 2.00GHz I am using right now. Still putting more memory in, normally $50 or less, will speed the machine up so it feels new.

When XP came out many ran it on 300MH (0.3GH) machines with 256MB and were happy, but everything has gotten slower and larger.

The 448MB means you have a 512MB machine with the video using 64MB of the memory.

If you had a local geek to help you this machine would run Linux quite well with no upgrades. But that is a whole other subject. (I have a 2.6GHz P4 machine with 512MB running a couple versions of Linux very well.)

gypsy97 · RV-Dreams Family Member

I just checked and have:

Dell Dimension DIME521
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 processor
3200+

bjoyce · RV-Dreams Family Member

An Athlon 64 3200+ should be about the same as a Pentium 4 3.2GHZ, which is about like an Intel Core 2 Solo 1.6 to 1.8GHZ. Since you can buy current machines running 1.8GHZ Core 2 Solo processors and Vista, though they are the cheaper ones, your processor should hold up a few more years especially running XP instead of Vista.

I went to Crucial.com memory for Dell Dimension E521, which I also recommend and upgrading your machine with 2GB more of memory (2 sticks) is $27.98.

dewwood · RV-Dreams Family Member

Caution! I am not a computer guru so take what I say with a grain of salt. My computer guy told me to reduce the amount of programs which load up automatically on start up. There is a way to only open the programs which you need when you start your computer this can speed up your processing. I am not going to attempt to explain the how to because it would probably not be right but maybe someone more computer savvy than me could explain it better.

gypsy97 · RV-Dreams Family Member

I haven't been able to get to or modify the start-up program, and there are some programs that come up automatically that I would like to get rid of in start-up. If I WAS able to access it I would probably get a message that only the Administrator could change it ashamed

Does anyone remember the old days of computing when we wrote our own start-up programs?

Another thing I've been trying to do to clean up my system is to remove unwanted cookies. I honestly don't know how some of them get there. For example, mail.ru. I believe .ru is an extension indicating that it originates in Russia, as .de is German, etc. I just deleted the mail.ru this afternoon. I also delete anything with *ad* in it, but there are still hundreds of them and I wish there was a way to tell which are junk and which are useful.

gypsy

RVDude · RV-Dreams Family Member

Click on this CNET procedure for dealing with auto-start programs...

gypsy97 · RV-Dreams Family Member

Just to let you all know, adding two 1GB memory chips, for a total now of 2-1/2 GB of memory, has worked wonders with speeding up my system. Now I'm going to tackle the storage on the hard drive. I have about 45 GB free, and I am planning to remove all my photos and genealogy records to CD's. I just purchased 100 CD's for this purpose! Also, I use Avast free anti virus program, and I'm considering getting the paid Premium version. Does anyone have experience with this? I know I need more security but I don't want a program that keeps me from doing what I want, so I have been using the low settings on whatever security program I have. I'll quit computing before I let a security program determine what I can see and do, and how I can operate, so I hope there is a middle ground out there someplace.

gypsy

bjoyce · RV-Dreams Family Member

gypsy: I am glad adding memory was so successful.

When you copy everything to CDs I would make two copies and put them in different places, like leave one set with a relative. Since you are planning on using these CDs for archive please use the "verify" setting on the CD writing software, which compares the CD to the originals and makes sure everything was copied perfectly. These are just recommendations and I am just trying to be safe.