Housekeeping an ageing Compaq Presario

[Cameronian]

SWMBO has Compaq Presario V6000 of pensionable age. A gift from her father, she's reluctant to call in the knacker for now. In a reversal of rôles, the housekeeping has fallen to me. The said housekeeping seems to be a fairly drawn out weekly struggle and I just wonder if I am doing things in the most efficient order.

First the spec.:-

Compaq Presario V6000
Vista Home Basic
Pentium T2060 1.6 GHz.
2.00 GB RAM
111 GB HDD

Here's the weekly process:-

Update Spybot and immunise - 20 minutes.
Update Malwarebytes and scan (which takes an Hour or more).
Run Revouninstall for junk files - due to HDD space neurosis - taking half an hour.
CrapCleaner clean and registry scan (sorry, mixture!) - another half an hour for the clean.
Defragment with Defraggler which takes ages (four hours plus) and always behaves oddly - very differently from XP and 7. At the start there's about 24 GB free space. This gradually drops to 15-ish and sometimes even to 8 GB before climbing to about 36 GB at the end.
MozyBackups are done automatically on the fly and I only occasionally use Windows Backup as well to an external drive because this takes six hours or more....

The machine does work better after all of this but slows down gradually as the week goes by until the next fix. I do things this way round because I thought it best to tidy up as best possible to get the best result from the defrag but all of the earlier steps require me to be sitting nearby for more than two hours to progress things manually whereas I leave the bloody thing to stew for the defrag. If I do the defrag first (overnight perhaps - and could I reasonably do the external backup at the same time or would they cock each other up?) would the more hands-on security stuff happen significantly faster once the drive has been defragged and so save me a lot of thumb twiddling?

I know she should get a new one but she won't. Perhaps she might be persuaded when Windows 10 has been running for a while...

[rogerg]

I gave all that up with windows7. Does most of it without me knowing!

[mixture]

CrapCleaner clean and registry scan (sorry, mixture!) - another half an hour for the clean.

I'm confused ? I don't think I had anything against registry scans.

I do however have a lot against people who waste their time on a lost cause. Might well be a gift from the old man, but no amount of time wasting on your part is going to speed that PoS up ! :E

(Running Vista probably isn't helping your cause either)

[Saab Dastard]

Assuming that you don't want to spend any money, then back up data and do a complete wipe and re-install of OS, eliminating any non-essential add-ons. That should speed it up more, and for longer.

If money is no object, the only thing that would speed up the system (RAM is already maxed at 2GB) is an SSD drive - but it would have a significant effect, even cloning the existing installation onto it. :ok:

If money REALLY is no object, then replace Vista with Win 7. :)

If money REALLY, REALLY is no object then buy a new laptop! :p

SD

[Cameronian]

I couldn't agree more, mixture. Corporal punishment and dead horse spring to mind every Wednesday afternoon. I give my own desktop the same treatment, including the defrag, in less time than the Malwarebytes scan takes on the Presario - which is why I want to do anything I can to speed up the bit which requires my presence. The whole machine works noticeably faster on a Wednesday evening but is this down to the defrag or the CrapCleaning etc.? I suspect that it's the defrag which plays the bigger part so doing that overnight on Tuesday might speed up the security stuff but perhaps the defrag would be compromised by only clearing the crap out afterwards. Is it reasonable to run the defrag and the backup at the same time overnight (i.e. would they sort things out between them?) or am I risking the reliability of the backup?

[mixture]

Is it reasonable to run the defrag and the backup at the same time overnight (i.e. would they sort things out between them?) or am I risking the reliability of the backup?

Defragging moves stuff around the platters, so all you're likely to do is make your backups grind to a halt as it plays a game of cat and mouse with the defrag software.

Most defrag software will run at the lowest priority anyway and not do much if other stuff is using the disk.

You mentioned the defrag takes four hours, how long does the backup take ? You could perhaps contemplate a fancy script that runs a defrag, checks for completion and runs a backup.

[Cameronian]

Thank you, Saab Dastard. I'd love to change it but she won't - yet, anyway. I just hope that her Dad long outlives the computer but I may have a fight on my hands if I am to achieve that.

The machine works just about fast enough for her - certainly until each weekend! - it's self-interest that presses me to ask how to cut down my own commitment to it on each Wednesday afternoon. I get the impression from you experts that changing the order of play would not help me but I am still interested in the viability of doing the defrag and backup at the same time overnight. It would save a lot of hassle but I fear that it wouldn't work and that I wouldn't know for sure until I had to do a restore for real.

I'm sure it was mixture who said that cleaning the registry was a madness. Once I've Cleaned the Crap the "Registry" button in the margin is like a magnet and I often can't resist! Then there's no point in scanning it if you're not going to clean it....


Sorry, mixture, because I think we crossed in the post. The backup takes over six hours with Windows Back up. Perhaps there's something faster but it would need to be uncomplicated too.

[Booglebox]

OK, OP. Here's what you do.
If you have any money at all: first priority is 2gb more RAM, total of 4gb.
You can check what memory's currently installed with the tool "CPU-Z", freely available online. It may have 1x 2gb installed, so you will have to get 1x 2gb, or 2x 1gb in which case you should obviously get 2x 2gb.
Now that's a 32-bit processor so you might only get to use 3.25gb of it but that's still a big improvement.
If you have no cash left after this, skip to final paragraph.

If you have any cash left, get a new HDD and put Win 7 on it. (if the user can handle it, Win 8.1 will feel lighter & faster)

If you have no computer dosh to spend:
1. go on an uninstall spree. Uninstall EVERYTHING that's not Microsoft. Uninstall all the printer drivers, "system utilities", etc. until you have nothing left but windows updates, Visual C++ crap, Silverlight, and maybe Office. You can keep ONE web browser too (that means getting rid of IE if it's not being used, in add/remove windows components). Install Adblock in that browser.
1.1. Replace whatever antivirus you have with MS Security Essentials.
2. Install only what the user really needs.
3. Leave the damn machine alone. Defragging is usually a waste of time. Junk-clean-up is best done by using the Disk Cleanup tool activated automatically by a scheduled task.

[Saab Dastard]

how to cut down my own commitment to it on each Wednesday afternoon

Write a comprehensive guide to perform the actions required for defragging and other faffs, at the most basic "then click next" level, and hand it to SWMBO, with the option - DIY or buy new.
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Once you get out of hospital (a team of doctors having laboured to remove a Presario), you may find that her attitude may have changed! :p

SD

[Matsapha]

Life on Mallorca is probably a little less convenient regarding access than where I live in the States, plus things are more expensive in Europe, so I can imagine why one might want to keep this system going instead of replacing it. This V6000 was apparently a very nice laptop three or four years ago. Reviews say models with the AMD processor were subject to overheating issues which would damage the motherboard. Sounds like you have something like this going on. None of those maintenance routines should take anywhere near that long. Vista is not the problem. I've had and have Vista on a couple of my notebooks and have no idea why Vista gets a bad rap.

I saw a fully featured Lenovo ThinkPad on Woot this morning for $199. It's already sold out but it's a good indicator of just how cheap really good system can be gotten these days.

As someone mentioned, wiping the disk and re-installing the OS is the best way to eliminate the bog (assuming you don't have a fried circuit in memory or on the MB, or a failing HD). You probably don't have the OS disks - but you may have the original OS in a small partition on your existing disk. Make some CD's from it and then you can wipe and re-install.

Here's a very useful and free program that will allow you to copy your disk to another disk - operating system and all, byte for byte. The copied drive is bootable and an exact duplicate of the one you've copied from. You'll need an external HD case with a USB cable and another hard drive as your destination disk. Once copied, replace the HD in your laptop with this new disk and see if you've still got a problem. This free program will do lots of other HD tasks as well.

MiniTool Partition Manager Software for Windows PC and Server (http://www.partitionwizard.com/)

Mike
San Diego

[vulcanised]

I think you're paranoid, running that lot every week :eek:

You could get some of that time back by running the defrag available from Auslogics (typically takes around 30mins on my machine).

[jimjim1]

I cannot explain it but have observed the effect three or four times.

Create a new user and try it out (log off the old one do not "switch" user). I have seen huge performance improvements on old Vista/7 machines.

If you like it, move all the data over to the new user folders if necessary.

After a while to make sure nothing has been left behind you might delete the old user and user data folders.

Takes about 5 mins to try it out.

Please report back if you test it.

I "discovered" this when I was fixing a machine with a broken user profile. User could not log on at all. Machine was back to as-new performance. It has previously exasperated me that Windows PCs seemed to gradually slow down over time with no visible reason or cure. I have repeated the excercise a couple of times more and it has "worked" in each case.

Some applications such as email clients or iTunes might need some work to get the data across.

Some applications offer the option "install for this user/all users" I have always chosen "all users". If you have some applications installed for one user then you will need to consider that.

[milsabords]

There are two frequent causes of laptop slowdowns:

1.Overheating, which makes the CPU run at a lower frequency. Cure: open the case and remove dust from the air cooling system.

2.IDE disk controller running in PIO mode. Cure: in device manager, uninstall disk controller and reboot, it will be re-installed in DMA mode.

Good luck !

[Cameronian]

Thank you all for your advice. Even though it's too late at night to take it all in and prepare a decent reply to each of you, I can't trip off to bed without expressing my appreciation.

It will take me a while to take everything on board and decide what to try first, particularly since you seem to have the problem surrounded and propose attacking it from all sides! I notice that nobody has yet mentioned Lubuntu!

There don't appear to be any overheating issues anywhere, according to Speccy. Unlike in Scotland there are no fitted carpets in this house, only marnle and tiles with a few rugs, so there's much less fluff everywhere. I have tried Auslogics defrag. It was really fast on my own machine but more or less the same as Defraggler on the Presario and didn't recover the lost free space as I described in the original post - I have no understanding of what all that's about because I've only seen it on that machine with Vista.

I'm tickled by the account change trick which seems to fit in with popular wisdom on the strangeness of Vista. I didn't think that installing more RAM was a goer in the V6000 but will look again more closely. However, after my weekly efforts the computer runs much better and is acceptably fast but gets stuck in the mud again by the following Wednesday - all of which makes me think that, while there are many things which might usefully be improved, the big issue is the gradual loss of free space on the HDD (I don't understand that either). It may well be that the improvement after Defraggler (which was not found after using the Auslogics product) is perhaps not due to the actual defragmentation but rather to the recovery of free space. Tonight there is 36 GB worth of free space while at lunchtime there was only a tiny 22.5. During defragging today the free space worked its way down to 9.7 GB which was getting nearly too tight to guarantee successfully finishing the actual defrag process in less than a week but the recovery back up to 36 GB free was achieved at the end of the process as usual.

It's all mad and I'm glad that mine doesn't do that neither now nor before under XP.

[sherburn2LA]

With 36G free you are not going to get much mileage out of a weekly defrag unless there is continous unusual activity.
If it is running slow then something is likely chewing the CPU or chewing the memory. What does your task manager say.
Regardless I would
a) uninstall everything you dont need or can easily reinstall.
b) look at your start up processes and stop all the ones not needed. At least switch to manual from automatic and disable some especially those nasty product updaters. Plenty of people if you google offering advice on that including MS themselves
c) Worst of all are the self important virus checkers and such. Unless you good lady is a reviewer of adult site content go with as lightweight a choice as possible. MS Essentials as good as any. In conjunction with a host blocker such as winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm which doubles as an ad blocker and speeds up browsing perfectly adequate for most people if not for Son of Jobs.

[finncapt]

My two penneth.

Since you have an external backup, put Mint 17 on the laptop.

You can test it from a usb stick first to make sure it works - the wifi may cause a problem but the rest probably won't.

Then, when you've installed Mint, you can selectively replace any files you need from the backup.

Mint, or any other Linux distribution, has programs to replace the likes of Word, Excel, IE etc.

The thing will be faster than it ever was.

[Booglebox]

During defragging today the free space worked its way down to 9.7 GB
That's normal. The program will use nearly all available space as spare/swap to complete the defragging process.

[Cameronian]

Well thank you, everyone, for having taken the time to
consider and advise. Several of you have suggested the obvious - to ditch the old thing and get a new cheap one that goes fast and has lots of space and the January sales approach. Unfortunately, as I explained at the start, sentimental circumstances don't permit that yet. It's not the cash, I'm pleased to be able to say, it's that it was a gift from SWMBO's Dad.

Quite a few suggestions relate to ways of speeding it up, while staying with Vista. The thing is that it works fast enough after its weekly clean even if it only reaches the following Wednesday in staggering condition. My problem is the time it takes to do the weekly clean which fills the afternoon and evening, even when I don't do a backup to external HDD.

Perhaps there's a quicker defrag utility that Defraggler (because that's the step which really does appear to make the difference to performance) but I'm afraid Auslogics defragmenter isn't that solution. It's just as slow on this machine and doesn't recover the free space lost during the week. I'm sure that there has to be a faster backup utility than the Windows one which comes with Vista because it's desperately slow but it would have to be easy and I don't know which it might be. To compare, the Windows utility takes less than half an hour to defrag my desktop in W7 Ult.

Once it has been retired, I plan to clean it up and install Lubuntu or similar just for fun and to keep the brain cells stirred - I'll look at Mint too, now....

I probably explained myself poorly at the start of the original post. At the moment my problem is with the slow speed of the weekly clean up rather than with the speed of the machine after it has been done.

[le Pingouin]

Why not skip defragging the drive? The drive isn't overly full so the benefit should be minimal. We're not talking FAT32 are we?!? :}

It would be interesting to see how fragmented the drive is after a week.

Don't know what else Defraggler is doing but it's rather unlikely the space freed up is anything to do with defragging. It must be deleting stuff & maybe that's where the improvement is coming from. Find out what it's doing & do it manually?

[vulcanised]

I rather agree with that.

If nothing else, all that defragging and other, imo, excessive activities must be shortening the life of the drive.

[le Pingouin]

MS reckons less than 10% fragmented isn't worth bothering with so that's probably a reasonable benchmark to use. Either use Defraggler to analyse the drive or at an elevated privilege command prompt:

defrag.exe c: -a

I'd almost forgotten about defragmenting drives - I just let Windows get on with it on Mme Pingoiun's laptops. Might get checked a few times a year if the laptop is on in the wee small hours. But then the drives are only half full. Entirely forgotten about on Linux, even with a very full drive. Used to play with it all the time with Win98 on FAT32 :)

Curiously defrag.exe reported a Vista drive as 5% fragmented while Defraggler reports 18%. Something to do with what Defraggler calls "low occupancy" perhaps?

[Cameronian]

So far as the defragging goes, I'm absolutely convinced that it's effective in the case of this installation. Well before midweek, each week, the laptop is going so slowly that it would drive me nuts. From button press to an open Chrome (she insists upon Chrome :ugh:) takes more than five minutes but around one minute and 30 seconds after the cleanup. CrapCleaner for several years took between 5 and 15 GB of rubbish out of the HDD every week but over the past year it has gradually crept down to around 100 to 200 MB a week even though Madam's pattern of work remains similar so I think it's likely that, proportionally, CrapCleaner bears a lesser responsibility for the weekly improvement recently. This summer I was away for about 12 days and missed two consecutive weekly cleans and the machine essentially stopped. Apparently it had posted repeated warnings that the HDD had so little free space that the next desired application might just not work. When I got back the defrag took almost 24 hours and I had to run it twice consecutively to get the free space back from under 4 GB (unreliable but is as I seem to remember it) to 36 GB. Unfortunately, with all of my own catching up to do I didn't take a note of the number of files and fragments at the start of the process. Two years ago the start position was typically 20 GB free space out of 111 GB, 15,000 fragmented files with 80,000 fragments. For some reason now it usually starts with around the same amount of free space but the fragmented file count is usually around 2,000 and the number of fragments at about 7,000. I don't know what the reason is for the reduction because the time taken to do the clean up and the free space recovered each time remains about the same, so does the change in performance. Defraggler usually stops with fewer than four fragmented files and under ten fragments remaining and quite often achieves zero of each. The free space is only recovered towards the very end of the process so stopping it early (and I'm often tempted!) doesn't achieve that. Using the "Quick Defrag" fails to recover the free space at all and so it often stops with less than 10 GB free.

I'd love to be able to avoid it all but the machine essentially died when it was left undone for only the two Wednesdays in a row so I don't see that I have any choice. I emphasise again that the computer is very revived each week by doing it. It never reaches a gallop but does a fair imitation of a trot!

Respectfully, I don't think I have any option other than to find a defragmenter and a backup program equally efficient and simple to use but hopefully quicker.

[finncapt]

What you describe is abnormal/unusual behaviour.

I would seriously consider replacing the hard drive - it shouldn't need defragging once a week.

[Rick777]

I have a Compaq C700 that has about the same specs as your computer. I got it,in 2008 and it had Vista on it. I put in a new hard drive and Win 8 a year ago and got the case cleaned out. Works fine. I never do any maintenance on it at all.

[cockney steve]

My desktop was built from bits ~10 years ago. The video card popped a capacitor (later repaired) and was replaced with a better one. I upgraded the memory with used ebay purchases....max is supposed to be 3 Gb but it "sees" the 4 installed :) It's partitioned with XP( sole purpose to drive a R/C helicopter flight sim) and the default is Linux.

This ubuntu has not been updated for at least 6 years!....When my kids visit,i complain that U-tube and flash player no longer work. nor does the DVD burner.

They shrug their shoulders and tell me to bin "that old junk"
I plug in a camera....itis recognised and pics are downloaded......I plug in a printer....Laser, dot-matrix, Inkjet are all automatically recognised. It prints letters and pictures. it works and is prompt...anything over 5 seconds ,is a "cancel and try again" issue. .....In extremis, I turn it off at night and reboot it the
following morning....otherwise it's on 24/7/365.

get rid of your windoze..Ubuntu is free they'll even send you a disc if you can't be bothered to download and DIY..
I have never gone through ANY of that rigmarole you do weekly :eek:
You must really, really love your wife to put up with that..:}

[Booglebox]

This ubuntu has not been updated for at least 6 years!
Never upgrade. Recent releases have the default shell (Gnome 2) replaced by something called "unity" which is a completely different (and IMHO vastly inferior) user experience :ugh:

[le Pingouin]

C'mon guys! Running an expired OS is dumb, no matter which brand it is. You do know you can install desktops other than the default? Or just use one of the *buntus with the desktop you like. Ubuntu 14.04LTS is supported until April 2019 so will likely outlive the hardware.

Have a look at MATE (forked from GNOME 2) or something like LXDE - they provide a "traditional" style GUI & are relatively light on RAM.

[Booglebox]

Ubuntu 14.04LTS
Good point, worth upgrading to.

[ex_matelot]

Is the computer running, or ever run a Norton anti-virus product?

Download adw cleaner to get rid of adware.

I use Ccleaner, malwarebytes and advance system care. All are free. My anti-virus is AVG free.

I have a spare PC and a spare laptop that I use for "buggering about" with. I've tried allsorts and slowly learned from some mistakes. Ubuntu is the way ahead if you want a quick operating system on an old spec computer. The learning curve could outweigh the benefits though -depending on beardyness levels.