h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have a PC with a Pentium 4 3Ghz processor and a laptop with a Celeron 1.86GHz processor. The PC runs Windows XP, the laptop runs Windows 7. Both run AVG 9 anti-virus and thinkbroadband internet usage monitor. The PC also runs ZoneAlarm firewall, Spybot anti-spyware and Boinc/Seti. That pretty much covers the software running in the background on the two computers.

Recently I've found a couple of games that run better on the laptop than they do on the PC, for no apparent reason. The games are supposed to work with XP or Vista - no mention of Windows 7. I've also noticed a slight lag when typing, e.g. when writing this post (and others) for H2G2 threads.

I got in touch with customer support for the company that sold the games and did everything they suggested - check drivers are up-to-date, followed the Microsoft guide to disc cleanup. Nothing helped and the games still run slowly on my PC. An anti-virus scan shows no viruses and a spyware scan showed a few tracking cookies, the removal of which did nothing to help the situation.

Can anybody suggest why my PC is running more slowly than it should be?

tools-clear history????

My usual browser on the PC is Firefox and that's set to clear history when Firefox closes. I cleared history as part of the Microsoft disc cleanup process.

have you checked task manager/processes to see what, if anything, is taking up lots of processing power?

Also, have you checked if your av or other background proggies are running scans or updates?

Do they both have the same amount of RAM and are the graphics chipsets/cards the same? And are the processors dual or single cores?

Information should be in device manager.

1. Download C-cleaner, run it after updating it, (ensure you've not got anythign in the recyucle bin ETC., you want to keep first, natch), Although MS and firefox etc, have features to clear history, cookies etc, they're crap and don't really do it fully. Plus with the C-cleaner you can tidy up the registry.
2. Go to MSconfig, and look at every item that is running at startup and in services, check each item online and disable those that ought not be there.
3. Use Avast instead of AVG (AVG slows down overall processer and RAM speed on the PC as it seems to take up a lot more resources), (though you should be aware the background Avast downloading update thing can relaly grind things to a halt when it starts soemtimes).
4. Update your Avast, SpiBott, AddAware, and run them all to make sure there isn't anything untward sneaking about.
5. Run Disk defragmentation (I just use the windows one, though the one by the people that make C-cleaner is good if like me you've a couple of folders that are massive and which are constantly in a state of flux so get fragmented a lot quicker than the rest of the harddrives).
6. If none of that makes a differnce, you can start looking at how much harddrive space you've got free; if not much its probably time to uninstall some of those game demos and other bits of software you don't really use (though on doing this each time you'll want to run C-cleaner afterwards to remove lefover registry entrys), and if you've uninstalled/deleted a lot of stuff run disk defragmentation again.
7. Then, once a week, on a suitable day/time set aside a bit of time when your near the PC but not using it so you can run update on Avast, C-cleaner, Spibott, Addaware, and then run C-cleaner, Avast, Spibott Addaware and then a disk defragmentation- Especially with defragementing if you do it frequently it really doesn't take any time at all (I defrag my two half teribyte drives (each more or just about half full), in the time it takes me to boil the kettle and make a cuppa (but I do it weekly)...
Oh, and it might be worth mentioning that ensuring drivers and suchlike, and windows update are all uptodate... Personally I used to have a lot of that* kinda stuff set to do it automatically, but found it just kept causing sudden glitches as there was a sudden unexpected boost in the demmands on the system, whilst I was trying to do someting else, so I just tend to run any update stuff once a week, just before doing all the cleaning out registry and defraging and virus scans etc...
Oh, Also, it may be worth trying turning off the things like AVG/Avast background scanning things, whilst doing certain tasks, like aplaying a game... Some bits of software just don't get on so well as others when there are things like antivirus running in the background.... (of course turn em back on as soon as you want to go back on da internet )

Hardware wise in terms of speeding up the PC, I found with this machine the thing that make the biggest differnce wasn't the increase in the CPU/processer, but the increase in the amount and the speed of the RAM I installed... but its not like a reight uptodate machine or anything, though I've seen some peoples complaints with far far faster/better I7 quadcore X2 machines with twice as much RAM as me, hitting more problems than I do and getting less performance seemingly than my somewaht price-restricted setup

has 2Legs been anywhere near it?

Taking things in no particular order:

Menthol Penguin: Both processors are single core, both computers have the same amount of RAM. I don't know what chipset the laptop uses, but the PC has an nVidia GeForce graphics card. I've made sure the drivers for that are up-to-date.

Ictoan: None of my applications are running scans or updates. I checked via Task Manager and found that one instance of svchost.exe was hogging up to 50% of CPU time. Further inspection showed that the service in question was QTJava.zip. I don't have much use for QuickTime, so I uninstalled it. This got rid of the rogue svchost.exe but didn't solve the problem with the game speed / typing lag.

2legs: I've tried Ccleaner in the past and not found it very helpful. The things run at startup are already down to the bare minimum. All my anti-virus and anti-spyware programs are up-to-date. My disks are defragmented. I have 86% hard drive space free.

It may help to turn 'Automatic Updates' off.

-- just remember to update manually occasionally.

... and check out these tips: http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic87058.html

Right, I'm most of the way through the tips on the site Taliesin suggested. I even used CCleaner which, as I expected, did nothing helpful. So far I've seen no improvement in the speed of the offending games. The typing lag seems to have improved, but that's about it, so far.

two things then
1) In Boinc/SETI make sure you set the max CPU utilisation to less than 100%. I tend to use 50% max for mine. Also check that the network utilisation is less than 100% as that can also cause slowdowns of the system.

2) make sure you 'snooze' Boinc/SETI before running games or when typing a lot. I have found it, on mine, to be very variable in its impact. Mines a dual core so usually SETI is running two jobs. Sometimes it happily processes 2 jobs in the background with little or no impact. Other times, even with the 50% cap, it causes real slow downs to the system. Snoozing it removes the problem.

3) Get AVG to do a boot up/safe mode scan. Can't remember exactly how you do this but there should be a setting within the options/tools. This will scan the computer without all the usual crud (and therefore hopefully any nasties) unloaded. Also do a spybot scan whilst yer at it.

Having said all that I have noticed mine running a bit slower recently (not linked to other problems I've had with it!) and still not 100% sure of the cause.

hmmm...that'll be a monty python '2 things' then

Or even a monty python 'amongst the things'!

No one expects the !

The CPU utilization while the computer is in use is already set to 50%. I've reduced the amount of page file usage, but I don't know what that will do. I've also set the maximum CPU time used to 50%.

I've tried suspending SETI while running games and it's had no effect.

There's only one thing left to try, something I've been reluctant to do. I'm going to disconnect from the internet and turn off ZoneAlarm. I don't know what effect that will have, if any. I'll let you know.

hmmm, yes. I switched from ZoneAlarm to Commodo quite a while ago after having probs with ZA taking ages to do anything.
I did used to find, however, that uninstalling, rebooting and reinstalling ZA could solve such problems sometimes.

What about network usage in SETI? Do you have a lot of tasks in there?

There's very little network usage in SETI.

As for ZoneAlarm, I turned it off and one of the problem games ran fine. I'll have to re-install the other before I can check that one. Fingers crossed!

At least you're back so it hasn't screwed the connection up!

If it does do the trick (turning off ZA) have a look at http://personalfirewall.comodo.com/ as a replacement. But more involved and techy but does seem to do an excellent job.