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The Lord of the Flies
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Re: A Good System Cleaner for WinXP That Is Actually Legitim

Sat Feb 05, 2011 11:39 am

Okay, I did. hehehe

The RAM is on its way hehehe
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Re: A Good System Cleaner for WinXP That Is Actually Legitim

Sat Feb 05, 2011 12:21 pm

Not to cause any panic but the system and its primary hard drive sound to be at least 8 years old. Within the past couple of months I've had to replace a 40GB Maxtor and a 60GB Western Digital that were primary drives on systems of around that age. The 40GB was toast, but the 60GB was just "on the way" and was causing random stuttering and freezes. I'd run checks on the integrity of the drive just to be sure. Needless to say an OS reinstall becomes necessary if you end up having to replace a failing/failed system drive :P
 
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Re: A Good System Cleaner for WinXP That Is Actually Legitim

Sat Feb 05, 2011 12:42 pm

Prion wrote:
Not to cause any panic but the system and its primary hard drive sound to be at least 8 years old. Within the past couple of months I've had to replace a 40GB Maxtor and a 60GB Western Digital that were primary drives on systems of around that age. The 40GB was toast, but the 60GB was just "on the way" and was causing random stuttering and freezes. I'd run checks on the integrity of the drive just to be sure. Needless to say an OS reinstall becomes necessary if you end up having to replace a failing/failed system drive :P

Bit of a tangent, but I finally retired my ancient Slot A Athlon file server not too long ago. The drives (pile of truly ancient IDEs, mostly 80GB WDs) were old enough that they pre-dated FDB spindle motors, and after running for years in a damp crawlspace they were whining like a pack of feral cats in heat. Part of my plan for this weekend is to gut that system and re-use the case for my Linux "screw around" system (which is currently sitting out bare on my test bench).
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computron9000
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Re: A Good System Cleaner for WinXP That Is Actually Legitim

Sat Feb 05, 2011 12:46 pm

Prion wrote:
Not to cause any panic but the system and its primary hard drive sound to be at least 8 years old. Within the past couple of months I've had to replace a 40GB Maxtor and a 60GB Western Digital that were primary drives on systems of around that age. The 40GB was toast, but the 60GB was just "on the way" and was causing random stuttering and freezes. I'd run checks on the integrity of the drive just to be sure. Needless to say an OS reinstall becomes necessary if you end up having to replace a failing/failed system drive :P


AFAIK the defrag based in Windows XP also mandates at least an abbreviated scan-drive check on the drives before it will permit it to run, and he claimed to perform defrags after wiping out space... granted not a detailed bad-sector scan sort of thing, but still something could have / should have probably shown up in all the mucking around if that were the case.
 
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Re: A Good System Cleaner for WinXP That Is Actually Legitim

Thu Feb 10, 2011 2:21 pm

computron9000 wrote:
I responded to your PM, let me know how it goes.
No prob.

Okay, the RAM has arrived. I'm about to power-down my system to put it in there. But meanwhile I've used Auslogics Disk Defrag, Auslogics BoostSpeed, and CCleaner to defrag and clean crap off of my three HDDs and to clean more crap out of the Registry. So even right now, the system instability that I was experiencing for so long is all but eliminated. Computer's running real smooth now, and even rather faster and more efficiently.

AGAIN (most of) you guys rule! Especially the computron9000 most of all, who must be the most advanced computer-system in existence, even more advanced than the HAL 9000! And that's very, very *beep*ing advanced! hehehehe

Okay, so I'm off now to put the RAM in. I'll check back later to report! hehehe
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Re: A Good System Cleaner for WinXP That Is Actually Legitim

Thu Feb 10, 2011 3:59 pm

She's in! WOOOOO!

Click the link in my sig to see! hehehe

Okay, so gimme an activity so that I can tell the difference in a noticeable way, eh? Maybe a game, or something, anything that will show me the improvement in performance, etc., please? I wanna have fun with this hehehe

I think I'll try my own activity now by playing a game of Doom³ and see if there's any difference that I can tell hehehehe
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Re: A Good System Cleaner for WinXP That Is Actually Legitim

Fri Feb 11, 2011 1:08 pm

bdwilcox wrote:
The best cleaner is a system wipe and rebuild,

This is the answer you need. That, and a bigger hard drive. PS, you really need to be backing up your stuff. It's very irresponsible not to. Even something like Mozy or one of those.
 
computron9000
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Re: A Good System Cleaner for WinXP That Is Actually Legitim

Fri Feb 11, 2011 2:17 pm

The Lord of the Flies wrote:
She's in! WOOOOO!

Click the link in my sig to see! hehehe

Okay, so gimme an activity so that I can tell the difference in a noticeable way, eh? Maybe a game, or something, anything that will show me the improvement in performance, etc., please? I wanna have fun with this hehehe

I think I'll try my own activity now by playing a game of Doom³ and see if there's any difference that I can tell hehehehe


It won't be a tremendous improvement, but it should get you some extra FPS on that system. You are really working with old hardware there: hope the RAM helps now that you've got thing cleared up and defragged. You should pickup a bit of FPS in your games, due to extra throughput and additional RAM, especially if the game and OS exceeds your old threshold of ~1.25GB.

An old P4 system doesn't have a lot of easy upgrades for gaming. Maybe you can find a GPU upgrade on the cheap (used or new) but you're sort of stuck until you get a new motherboard and processor beyond that RAM upgrade.

Anyway, hope the thing is running better for ya.
 
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Re: A Good System Cleaner for WinXP That Is Actually Legitim

Fri Feb 11, 2011 4:51 pm

Oh, it is. It used to have an annoying stutter about once every second, but now runs really smoothly. I'm gonna do some other games as well--I've already been working on setting up the latest version of DarkPlaces for Quake and to play Nehahra. But then I fell asleep hehehe But I'm now awake again and it seems I'll need a bigger system to use the best of the lighting and shadowing in it, along with the high-rez textures, well.

I'm gonna try some of my other games that ran and hopefully see the improvement that I saw with Doom³, like EVE Online, and Half-Life 2, and Neverwinter Nights (which I've been playing at max settings), and whatever else I can think of hehehe

But not only do the games perform better, but so does the copying and moving of large files, like from one drive to another. Maybe it's just my imagination, but it does seem that they move possibly even more than twice as fast. Seriously, before the clean-up and the increase in RAM they seemed to move much more slowly.

And my system is multi-tasking MUCH better and without a hitch! I used to have to stop running my µTorrent to do even a few other things, but now it seems I can run it at almost any time while doing much more things all at once. It was very handy when working of the DarkPlaces stuff just last night. Maybe I'll go seeding out some new things, like what I've hardly done in like over three years now hehehehe

Ah! I just thought about how I've had Medal of Honor: Airborne on ice for more than half a year now. Maybe I'll actually try that one again, because it just really wouldn't work well enough to be playable. Well now maybe it will work hehehe

Thanks, computron9000! You're the greatest! Yay for the advancement of computer-technology! :D
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computron9000
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Re: A Good System Cleaner for WinXP That Is Actually Legitim

Sat Feb 12, 2011 9:13 pm

Glad I could help buddy.

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