I’m talking defrag, registry cleaning, browser cache etc. so the pc isn’t cluttered with junk from the last years. Is this just physical, electric wear and tear? Is there something that can be done to prevent or reverse this?
In: Technology
They don’t, they run at the same speed throughout their operational lifetime. You’re just making them do more that they weren’t doing before.
As an IT professional, programmer and system admin please:
– Stop defragging. It does basically nothing nowadays, certainly nothing worth the disk wear or the time it takes. Defragging is a handover from the days of 20Mb hard drives on older filesystems on slow-latency hard drives. Just stop it. Especially if you have an SSD – you’re literally just wearing the SSD away, for no reason. If you want to avoid the need to defrag, don’t run your hard drives more than 90% full, that’s when things start to fragment to jam them into the gaps. If your drive isn’t more than 90% full, it’ll sort itself out and likely will never fragment in the first place. And modern PCs will basically not noticeably slow (even on a benchmark measurement) just because they’re slightly fragmented.
– Registry cleaning – again, does nothing. The registry on an average machine is maybe 50Mb-100Mb or so? Pathetic by modern standards. Cleaning it does nothing. You can remove services and auto-start entries, but use a proper tool for that, not some pay-for junk off the internet, or in the registry itself because if you cock it up, your computer won’t boot properly. Sysinternals has Autoruns available to you for free, but pretty much most of what it does you can do with Windows 10 task manager, etc. on its own.
– Browser cache – again, does nothing. You’re just making the problem worse. Modern browsers manage their own cache and clearing it out makes nothing faster, just the opposite. Unless the page you are loading is not the page you expected (i.e. it’s not up-to-date), cleaning your browser cache is entirely the wrong thing to do.
What you want to do:
– Make the computer do less. Have less programs installed (no, it doesn’t matter how full your disk is, it’s to do with how much stuff is running all the time). Get rid of anything you don’t need to be running 24/7 (e.g. get it off your taskbar, stop it running with Windows, or stop it staying around all the time – it’ll still work when you actually need to use it). Steam, for example, does not need to be in your taskbar 24/7. Stop it, using the options in the program or Autoruns. Then when you want to play a game, you run Steam.
Personally, about 4-5 taskbar icons (by the clock) I find annoying. I work to get rid of them. Almost all of them can go. The Intel display one (unless you think you need to use it), nVidia icon, Java, Steam, printer monitors, etc. etc. Get rid of them. The screen will still work, your games will still work, your printer will still work. But you’re not constantly running them 24/7. There are also dozens of services, programs that run on startup, and other junk that’s always running that don’t need to be. Almost all third-party program services (e.g. game launcher services) can be changed to manual startup (and then they will start if they’re needed, but won’t if they are not). Uninstall stuff you don’t use.
Your machine is no slower than the day you bought it. It’s just running all the shit you installed on it for the last few years and never removed and which is running 24/7 even though you don’t realise or don’t even use it any more.
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