I was handed a computer to try and clean up yesterday. It is an 2 GHZ AMD 64 bit CPU running windows 7 64-bit with a whole 1 GB of ram. Yes I said 1 GB of ram, I cringed too. I've got the owner convinced to upgrade that to 4GB and he's gonna go with a dual core processor while he's at it which should make a ton of difference.
In any case, on to the problem. The windows install was pretty bogged down, somewhere around 80 running processes and no free physical memory. The machine actually booted to the desktop fairly quickly but wouldn't respond to anything due to all the running processes. I went through the task manager and killed enough tasks that I could navigate. I ran ccleaner on it to clear some junk. I went through the startup processes and cleared all the non-essentials. I went into the add-remove programs and removed the junk. I ran ccleaner again and cleared up the remnants and even ran the registry cleaner. I ran malwarebytes and an AVG virus scan and was actually surprised to find the system very clean. It's whole problem seemed to be an absurd amount of "legit" startup items. After I got it all cleaned up to around 40 running processes I defragmented the drive using defraggler and manually bumped the size of the swap file up to 1.5x ram.
The system is now running great, well as great as it can with only 1 GB of ram. All except for one problem.... when the machine boots up it comes to the screen where you can select a user, I select the user and then it hangs on the welcome screen for as much as 20 minutes before it goes on. It didn't take more than 20 minutes to boot before I started!
How can it possibly be booting slower now with an optimized drive, larger swap file, and 0 extra components running at startup?
In any case, on to the problem. The windows install was pretty bogged down, somewhere around 80 running processes and no free physical memory. The machine actually booted to the desktop fairly quickly but wouldn't respond to anything due to all the running processes. I went through the task manager and killed enough tasks that I could navigate. I ran ccleaner on it to clear some junk. I went through the startup processes and cleared all the non-essentials. I went into the add-remove programs and removed the junk. I ran ccleaner again and cleared up the remnants and even ran the registry cleaner. I ran malwarebytes and an AVG virus scan and was actually surprised to find the system very clean. It's whole problem seemed to be an absurd amount of "legit" startup items. After I got it all cleaned up to around 40 running processes I defragmented the drive using defraggler and manually bumped the size of the swap file up to 1.5x ram.
The system is now running great, well as great as it can with only 1 GB of ram. All except for one problem.... when the machine boots up it comes to the screen where you can select a user, I select the user and then it hangs on the welcome screen for as much as 20 minutes before it goes on. It didn't take more than 20 minutes to boot before I started!
How can it possibly be booting slower now with an optimized drive, larger swap file, and 0 extra components running at startup?