Windows XP Slow Startup | slow shutdown windows xp

You have a PC with windows xp slow startup. Wasn’t it great! Your spanking new Desktop or laptop was running like a dream. Fast as lightning. Then as time progressed things started to happen. It takes a while to startup when you switch on. Occasionally things just seem to go at a crawl. Hah, Lets try one of those amazing fixit programs advertised. Shell out bucks and she’ll be OK. Humm…. That will fix the slow startup windows xp problems. Things seem to be a little bit better. What about that program that says you have a register problem. That will fix it. Well believe it or not they may fix a lot of problems but they may not be the one you have got. They most probably not be what a lot of people have got.

I will tell you something about new PC’s and laptops. They have something in them that is mechanical.
Yes a hard drive. They are these days a sophisticated item but they are still mechanical.

My first PC was made by Wang. My first laptop was made by Wang. (I have still got it. Probably a collector’s item now). Some people may remember Wang. They were one of the original Word processing systems companies. Way before MS Word and they were good. (At the time) Well, they produced a PC. It had a 10 megabyte disk drive and I thought that was BIG. Yes it was mechanical and yes today’s disks are still mechanical. Now we consider gigabyte disk drives small.

Eventually disk drives will disappear as static (means it does move anything but bits) ram (for the un-initiated “random access memory”) becomes so cheap that this will do away with them.

In the meantime you have your mechanical disk drive.

Well to get these “bits”, in which a number of them make up your file, a mechanical head has to move over a recorded surface. Occasionally it may pick a bit up wrong. That’s OK the manufacturers knew this would happen so put in things called “checksums” that can up to a certain amount actually figure out what was missing and replace it. Good, that’s fine.

What about those it can’t? Well hard luck you have a corrupted file! The only way to fix that is to restore it from somewhere. But that is another subject. The main thing is that if this is some sort of system file it may cause some problems and slow down your PC until it either sorts itself out or gives up. (WOW a system crash) That makes a system really slow (like stopped).

Back to your slow system.

Let me explain the manufacture of hard disks. One thing the manufacturers know is that the disks they manufacture will have defects on the surfaces of them. They produce millions of them. Do they chuck away the ones with defects? No! Each one goes through a test. As they are tested and a defective part of the disk is found they use a bit of smarts and make that bit of disk unavailable. If the number of defective parts go over a certain number then they reject the disk.

It may be that you have a labeled 80gbyte disk. But in actual fact you may have only a 79.9999 gigabyte disk. What the heck, what’s a few bits between friends.

Unfortunately, sorry I had to say that word. Parts of the disk surface may become defective afterwards. You may not know it until months (or even a year) after you have bought your state of the art PC or laptop.

Why?

Well when you first got your PC you may only have used 6 or 7 gigabytes of your 80 gigabyte disk. Over the months or year you put on all your good stuff, (photo’s, games and such) Your disk gradually uses 30 gigabytes. (Got lots of photos you know) Then bingo one photo is written across the defective part.

One thing about windows xp is that it goes checking all the time around the used portion of the disk. It hits the defective part and hey hold on have a look at this again, and again, and again as it tries to recover the file. Eventually if it can’t it times out. Wow your system springs back to life again. Now if this happens to a system file it may take longer. Your system may not crash but it will take longer checking it out.

This can manifest (yes, I know some posh words) in a slow startup when you first switch on. This is because windows does a lot of checking at this time. Unfortunately windows keeps a lot of this stuff to itself.

That’s what these purveyors of good stuff to fix everything up for you depend on.

Now I have got all the crap out of the way I had better tell you what you should do first before forking anything out. (money that is)

This is pertaining to windows xp but most of it is also relevant to other windows OS’s

The first thing is checking that damn disk for bad spots and corrupted files.

Perform the following:

1. On your start menu (bottom left corner) place your mouse pointer and click the right mouse button.
2. Place your mouse pointer on “explore” and click the right mouse button.
3. You should now have a screen showing your file structure.
4. Place your mouse over the part that probable says “Local Disk (C)
(Whatever it is called it should have the (C)

5. Left click and it should highlight. Right click the mouse while it is selected.

6. You should get another menu. Right at the bottom you will see “properties”. Left click it.

7. You should get a box that shows a pretty circle with blue and pink segments in it. (If you have more pink than blue then you are in a good state space wise on your disk. If you have only a small sliver of pink then you are in some other trouble. Send me a comment if you want)

8. At the top of the box there is a menu. Click “Tools” with your left mouse button.

9. You should come up with another box. In it there should be a selection “Check Now”. Left click it.

10. In the box that appears tick both of the “check disk” options with your left mouse buttons and then click “start”

11. You should then come up with a message with a load of waffle. Just click “yes”

12. Your system will now restart and start doing good things. You can what if you want. You may or not see some errors coming up. It may say restoring, it may say deleting things but just let it ramble on.

13. What it will do is make unavailable bad parts, it may be able to restore some parts from a special segment of disk.

14. Eventually it will restart. This may take a while depending on the size of the disk so it is best to schedule it when you do not want to use it.

Now your windows xp slow startup may have improved may even be fixed. There are other factors that affect windows xp slow startup which I will cover in my next post.

Want to learn more about computers and windows xp find Windows Books here.

Please have a look at my other article sites:

PC Security

If you liked this article please bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Windows XP Slow Startup | 1 Comment »

File cleanup is an important part of fixing your windows xp slow startup problem. It can be significant cause of slowing down your PC even once windows xp is up and running.

We have fixed up errors on the drive and hopefully your startup is at least a bit faster. What else is there?

What also happens over time is that a lot of crud gets left on the hard drive. This crud can be temporary files, files that you have deleted and reside in the recycle bin and logfiles that in some cases can grow very big.

Now how do we get this crud on our disk? Well I have just mentioned one, deleted files that go to the recycle bin. Sometimes these files could be gigabytes in size. (Remember that video you deleted last week?)

Crud can be left when a program terminates because something has gone wrong.

One of the biggest is because naughty you do not close down your PC properly. Remember you were typing that large document. You finished and instead of closing word down and shutting down windows properly you just hit that power off button!

Naughty, naughty, naughty.

When you start using a program (MS word for example) It generates temporary files. When you are writing a document your word document is actually written to the temporary file. When you click on “save document” it saves from this temporary file down to your real document file on disk. More temporary files are generated when you change things. (You have probably noticed that you can undo things you have typed) Very clever. Temporary files are kept of your original document several times back that enables you to go back and undo (or redo) things.

Finished! , Hit the power off button. Now if you had closed MS word down and shut down windows properly all these temp files would have been neatly cleaned up and deleted.

Heck, I’ve just hit the power off button. MS word and windows have not had the time to do this I have just chopped them off at the neck.

When you switch on your PC again windows no longer knows about these temp files because all the pointers to them have gone so there they stay.

You continue being naughty, your disk gradually gets more and more crud you may even end up with more crud than good stuff eventually, especially if you are a heavy user of MS Word. You can get some big and lots of temp files there.

Well let’s give a bit of help. Start with yourself, whenever you finish close down any programs you are using and close down windows properly. (You know, click start bottom left corner then click “Turn off Computer”)

Lets get rid of that stuff in the recycle bin.

There are three ways of doing this, easy, harder and easier.

Let’s start with “easy”. If you have a “recycle bin” icon on your desktop perform the following.

1. Left “double click” on it.
2. A window should open that shows in the right pane all your files and documents in the recycle bin.
3. In the left pane at top left you will find “empty the recycle bin ”left click” on it.
4. All the files and documents will disappear.

And that’s it, simple isn’t it.

Now if you do not have a “recycle” icon on your desktop, (sometimes happens) you will have to do it harder.

1. Go into your file Manager. (what’s “file manager”)
File manager allows you to manage your files and documents (copy, delete etc. But of course you knew this.)
2. “Right” click on “start” in the bottom left corner of your desktop.
3. “Left” click on “explorer” (this is not Internet explorer. Microsoft called it this jut to confuse you)
4. You will get a window that shows you all your folders in the left pane and all your files in the right pane.
5. In the left pane scroll down to the bottom until you see “recycle bin”
6. “Left” click on it and you will see all the files showing in the right panel.
7. “Right” click on the “recycle” bin folder and then click on “empty recycle bin”
8. Voila! All gone.

Now before I go to the “easier” way I though I should mention some thing about all those “temporary” files. There is an easy way and a hard way of getting rid of them.

I am not going to tell you the hard way because you may delete things you shouldn’t.

Now for the easier way of deleting things in the “recycle” bin (why didn’t I tell you this first? - I wanted to put you through a few hoops)

The easier way gets rid of stuff in the recycle bin and all those temporary files as well. All you have to do is down load a program from here http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner and install it. (It’s free) All you have to do then is run it and click the icon and then “run cleaner” and it will get rid of all those files in your recycle bin as well as all those “orphaned” temporary files plus a few other things as well.

All you have to do is to remember to maybe run this program about once a month and you will be OK.

Just one useful suggestion, if you are deleting large files (such as video files which may be gigabytes in size) It may be useful to stop them going to the recycle bin. As long as you are sure you do not want to recover them you can stop them going by:

In file manager normally you would just press the ”delete” key. If instead if you hold the shift key down and then pressed the “delete” key this will delete it and also stop it going to the “recycle” bin.

Now it is hopeful that your windows xp slow startup problem has been fix a bit more. Please see my next post as there is something else you can do that may improve it even further.

http://www.how-do-you-do.info

If you liked this article please bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Windows XP Slow Startup | No Comments »