Help my PC run faster?

[oldtechie]

Also posted in Software

Question for any PC 'guru' out there. Hope it's useful to general population:
How to reset/release memory and speed the system back up w/o doing a restart?
I have a 5yr old Dell Dim.4600, P4@2.4Ghz, 1MB RAM, XP-Pro/SP3, ATI A-I-O 9000Pro video card w/64MB (weak, but it works and not ready to but a Quadro FX yet). I run everything on this one machine - eCab, Firefox, email, QB Pro, Quicken, etc-etc-etc. Sometimes in-out of several of them (and others) during the day. I'm a solo custom remodeler and also a semi-techie from a prior life and spend WAY too much time trying new stuff keeping the system 'clean' via utilities like CCleaner, EasyCleaner, Reg cleaners and defraggers.
I have read that Windows often does not 'release' memory that has been "assigned' to an application after that app is closed, and so the 'sludge' builds up and slows down the system until you do a Windows restart. Problem is it takes my system a LONG time to fully shut down & restart so I avoid it as much as possible.
So finally here's the question - is there a 'shortcut' way to 'flush' the 'held' resources without doing a full restart ?
One suggestion I read was to open TaskMgr (Ctrl-Alt-Del), shut down explorer.exe, and then re-start it.
Any suggestions ?

 

[stash]

IMO, I would stop wasting time with reg cleaners, defraggers and other useless crap and put more RAM in your machine.

 

[badnewcastle]

Ctrl-Alt-Del find Explorer.exe, highlight it and click End Task
then, click "New Task" and type explorer.exe.

Also, as Stash said, get more Ram I think you meant to put 1GB ram not 1MB. Go up to 2GB.

 

[clarkey01]

2GB will speed up nicely.

 

[newmachineoverlord]

Originally posted by: stash
IMO, I would stop wasting time with reg cleaners, defraggers and other useless crap and put more RAM in your machine.

I have 2 GB of ram in an xp 3000+, and earlier today it was very sluggish until a reboot. This was unusual behavior and hadn't occurred until after I installed SP3 though. Anyways defragging is not useless and has a significant impact on disk access time.

 

[stash]

I have 2 GB of ram in an xp 3000+, and earlier today it was very sluggish until a reboot.

To me this sounds like some app leaking memory or malware. When I ran XP, the only time I ever rebooted was once a month for patches. My systems were either up constantly or in sleep mode or hibernation. There was never any degredation of performance, and there shouldn't be. That kind of performance issue hasn't existed in Microsoft OSs since the 9x kernel.

Anyways defragging is not useless and has a significant impact on disk access time

That's almost certainly false unless you have a really old drive. In these days of 7200 RPM SATA drives with large caches and very low seek times, it is very unlikely you would ever notice any difference in performance from defragging.

Have you done any testing that shows measurable improvement in performance?