Earlier today, I was astonished by a Facebook posting by a friend, who basically said her PC was performing badly…so she wiped and reloaded the whole OS. Now she’d realized how many applications were installed, and was lamenting all the time she’d have to spend re-installing them.

The reason this posting caught my eye was that another friend once told me he used the same method as his “tried and true” solution to any Windows problem. Lose a file association? Wipe and re-install. Machine running a bit slower than you’d like? Same solution. What an incredible waste of time. There are far better methods that are significantly less labor intensive and time consuming.

Apparently many people are convinced that any slowness in Windows must be the result of a virus or other piece of malware. This simply isn’t true (though I’ll bet millions of users have infected systems and are completely unaware of the fact). Well written viruses are stealthy. They won’t slow down systems so badly that owners are tempted to search for problems.

Badly written viruses are, of course, another ball of wax. They, like any other defective piece of code, could cause massive performance hits or repeated Blue Screens of Death.

I’ve suggested the use of a good Registry cleaner and a disk defragmentation tool (even the built-in Windows version is pretty good) on many occasions. These tools, along with a decent firewall to keep bad guys away, are still your best line of defense in terms of performance preservation. Machines degrade over time due to fragmented disks and bogus/unneeded Registry entries. They need maintenance, just like a car or any other electo-mechanical device.

You (hopefully) don’t swap out your car’s engine every time the oil is due to be changed. That’s what the “wipe and rebuild” method equates to, and it’s massive overkill. Install the right utilities, back up your disks regularly, and your system will effectively maintain itself.

I haven’t bought a new machine in years. Well, actually I have bought new machines but I’ve never kept the OS intact on one. It’s more accurate to say I haven’t bought a machine that’s been used to run Windows. Ergo, I wasn’t aware of the amount of sheer garbage being shipped on new Windows PCs.

That changed recently, when my wife picked up a new Dell. The amount of extra software shipped on it was truly astonishing — everything from come-on deals for various antivirus packages to useless “trial” versions of image editing software and scanning packages. We spent a bit of time in the Add and Remove Programs Control Panel, running uninstall programs, and otherwise eliminating all the garbage infesting the machine.

Why does all this junk end up on new machines? Because manufacturers are paid to put it there, that’s why. Software companies see new machines as fertile advertising turf, and hope they can convince consumers to use their applications (”hey, it’s installed already so I’ll just register it”). Some of the software, like certain antivirus or anti-spyware packages, might actually be useful. The rest is just taking up space on your hard drive and promising the world if you just pony up $29.95.

But hey, you paid for that disk. So the manner in which all that valuable space is used is up to you. Personally, I think PC and software vendors should pay consumers for the privilege placing advertising material on someone else’s machine. Then again, I also refuse to allow car dealers to put advertising stickers or plates on my new car.

Happily, there’s a way to get all that space back without wasting time waiting through a dozen uninstall programs. Some guys have written an application called the PC Decrapifier, which automatically removes many of the “craplets” (as they call them) installed by various vendors.

So if you have a new Windows PC filled with junk you don’t want, a quick download may help you clean it up. Fire up the application, grab a cup of coffee, and watch your free disk space grow.

A few months ago I wrote about an odd DVD problem I’d been having on my primary PC. The symptom was that discs weren’t being detected by the OS and simply wouldn’t play. CDs played fine. At that time I traced what I thought was the problem to a copy of PowerDVD that was a bit out of date. As it turns out, that wasn’t the problem.

Segue a month or so. I put a DVD into the player, and again it didn’t show up in Windows. I pulled the disc, cleaned it, and put it in again. Nothing. So I moved it to the other DVD unit in the same PC, and it showed up just fine. Indications seemed to point to a bad drive or cable, and I decided to run the error down using (as usual) the scientific method.

I had a spare drive hanging around, so I swapped it in. Still nothing, so I swapped cables. No change, so I moved the drive to the other position on the cable. Now, suddenly, it worked. This seemed to indicate a problem in the OS itself, which definitely didn’t sound appealing at all. I decided to use an old trick to force Windows to recognize the device all over. This is a bit tricky, and you want to back up critical files before attempting it.

The process itself was relatively simple. I opened Device Manager, opened the list of IDE/ATAPI adapters (the DVD drives are both IDE) and told the system to Uninstall each one. Once they were all removed, I rebooted the system again. As expected, Windows re-ran its device recognition process and started installing the devices again. One more reboot, and I popped a DVD into the recalcitrant device.

As if by magic, the device started working again. Since running this little fix, I’ve played 2 movies and a few audio CDs, just to give it a workout. So far, it’s working flawlessly. Is this the final fix? I’m not sure yet, but at least I didn’t spend money on a new drive I didn’t need.

Anyone who’s a long-time PC user knows that DOS (Disk Operating System — catchy, eh?) was the predecessor to Windows. Back in the day, I used to laugh when clueless media authors referred to Windows as an operating system. It wasn’t. It was simply a windowing environment that rode atop DOS.

In fact, it took years for Microsoft to remove the 16-bit DOS underpinnings from beneath non-NT versions of Windows. Versions like 95 and 98 really just integrated DOS and Windows together and provided a few new services. The original Windows NT was a real 32-bit OS kernel and didn’t really use DOS under the covers.

All this said, you can still get to a version of the command-line DOS prompt in even the most recent versions of Windows. You can open a “command window” from the Accessories menu, or use the Run option and type in cmd to open what most users know today as a “DOS box.” From there, the traditional set of command-line utilities can be accessed. If you’ve never tried it, open a DOS box and type the HELP command to see a set of these commands.

One thing I’ve noticed on a few machines I’ve managed is what’s called “command line completion” from within the DOS environment. This was hijacked (okay, “adopted”) from UNIX, where shells like tcsh and bash provide identical functionality. I finally decided to look around a few days ago, and found an article from Microsoft’s Knowledgebase that describes the process for turning it on. You can find the article here.

The process is pretty easy, especially if you’re familiar with the Registry Editor (regedit). I had things working in about 2 minutes and it’s a very handy trick. If you’re a UNIX/Linux user and used to having TAB as your path or command completion key, just set the CompletionChar and PathCompletionChar values to 9 (hex) and exit regedit. Open a new DOS box, and it should just work. Start typing the first few characters of a path or command, hit TAB, and it should complete the word for you (even if it contains spaces!).

If you use the DOS box to any extent, as I do, I also recommend right-clicking on the DOS window header and entering the Properties menu. From there, you can enable QuickEdit and Insert modes, which allow for easier cut and paste operations. I also make the box “bigger” by changing the layout to 60 lines in length with a font that fits my screen.

Experiment with this if you’re interested in command-line activity. Sometimes an old dog like DOS can make certain operations a whole lot easier.

It’s fairly obvious that a lot of energy is wasted every year when people leave appliances and lights on unnecessarily. We turn on the TV and a few lights, leave the room for an hour or two, and the meter keeps running. Some consumers are installing motion-sensitive on/off units that toggle lights when people move around rooms. After a period of inactivity, the lights shut themselves off.

Most laptop users know you can do the same thing in order to save battery power. Change a few settings in the Power Options control panel application, and you can have your monitor shut itself off after a specific period of inactivity. Likewise with hard drives and even the CPU, which can put the machine into hibernate mode. There’s even an application on Facebook that will allegedly tune your PC to comply (as much as possible) with Energy Star efficiency ratings.

The program, created by a company called SupportSoft, works “either by downloading a piece of SupportSoft software (an .exe file) that automatically performs the configurations or by following a tutorial written by SupportSoft that instructs users on how to change their PC’s configurations themselves.” Either is a reasonable option. Changing Power settings is a fairly simple operation, and one could simply select the pre-defined “max battery” scheme to enable some fairly aggressive power-saving options.

This is a great thing to see, especially as a free option from a company that normally provides IT support services. If more people adopted aggressive power-management settings, we could save huge amounts of energy just by “greening” our PCs. According to one estimate, “if 100,000 computers and monitors reduced electricity use to the level set by the “Green Your PC” app, it would save more than 11 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions annually (roughly the same as emissions from burning 13,000 barrels of oil).” Given the millions of PCs in households and businesses today, many of which are used only sporadically during the day, we could certainly save a whole lot more than 13,000 barrels.

Green your PC. Save a few bucks, and save the environment at the same time.

One of the major complaints users have about Windows is the amount of time the OS takes to start up. Thing is, in many cases it’s not Windows that’s the problem. Instead, it’s the number of add-on tasks that are installed by various applications and set to run every time the machine starts. All these extensions (they’re called the same thing in Mac-speak) can add an appreciable amount of time to your system startup processing. However, there’s an easy way to look at and modify or disable these tasks, even if the application vendor doesn’t provide that option.

Here’s how to do it. First, Boot up your machine. Use a watch to record the amount of time it takes you to get the login prompt. Then record how long it takes to log in after you’ve entered your usual login ID and password. These are your baseline numbers.

Now open the Windows Start menu and click on “run.” Now type in “msconfig” and hit enter. This brings up the System Configuration Utility, which allows the user to exercise a large measure of control over how the system operates. Next, click on the “Startup” tab. This will show you a list of each extension that’s set to execute at system boot time.

Now the fun part starts. I recommend you take a close look at what is and is not set to run at startup time. Remember that some of these programs are actually necessary to normal operation, so you don’t want to disable them indiscriminately. Make a list or take a screen shot of the “before” listing so you can fall back to it if something isn’t right after you’ve made changes.

Look for likely candidates — for example, the Sun Java updater runs automatically and I’ve never found an easy way to disable it. Also, some HP printers install automatic software update scanners that can be really annoying. Uncheck the items you want to disable, then apply the settings and exit.

Now, reboot and take a new set of elapsed-time readings. Depending on what you’ve disabled, you may save a few seconds or half a minute…or more. As an added bonus, if any of the disabled tasks ran as installed services over the life of the boot, you’ve probably saved some memory.

Now, that was easy. And you didn’t pay $40 or more for some software that claimed to “make your PC run faster.”

Many people seem to have problems finding and correcting PC hardware errors. I think this is because they see it as a complex, intricate system and don’t feel they have the ability to break down problem analysis into manageable steps. To be honest, troubleshooting can be difficult — especially when the problem is subtle or hard to pin down. The first thing to do is to define the problem clearly. Once you do this, the answer may suggest itself.

Witness a minor issue that cropped up on my system this week. I have 2 DVD drives, one HP and one Toshiba, installed. I popped a disc into the HP unit. It wouldn’t play, and my copy of Power DVD (Version 6) kept telling me there was no disc in the drive. I moved it to the Toshiba and it worked fine. Power cycling the machine brought the problematic unit back online, and it played the next disc just fine. Then the problem showed up again.

Thinking about it a bit, I realized Windows Update changes had occurred recently and figured this might be related to the issue. I visited HP’s site and found a firmware update for the drive, and pulled it down for installation. It needed to burn a bootable CD, and actually was able to access the HP drive just fine. This was, as they say, a hint. I hadn’t tried a CD, so I put one into the drive. It played fine, but DVDs went totally unrecognized even after I applied the firmware update.

Light dawned. Finally I had a clear problem description, and I fired up a copy of Nero’s DVD player. It found the disc with no problem, and was able to play both a movie and an audio CD. Power DVD would not, and I finally realized it was the culprit. Some recent OS update apparently introduced a driver change that caused the old (2005) version to stop working with this particular HP drive.

As I said, some PC problems can be subtle and very frustrating. But with a bit of experimentation, you can probably isolate and correct many errors without spending lots of money. Had I not tried several software packages, I might have ended up spending cash on a new DVD unit I didn’t even need.

I’ve been an iTunes user practically since the software appeared on the market, and generally like it quite a lot (especially since they’re going DRM-free). I’ve never had a problem with a download or with licensing, and have carried my iPod everywhere from the streets of London to the back woods of New Hampshire.

That said, the software is by no means perfect — as I found out recently. A few weeks ago I was prompted to download version 8.0.2. After grabbing the installer, I exited from iTunes and ran the upgrade…only to be greeted with an interesting error: “A program required for this install to complete could not be run. Contact your support personnel or package vendor.”

I’d seen this once before, and was told to simply remove and re-install the software. I did this once, but find it annoying since this means you have to re-enter settings and link back to your old library. So this time I ran through a bit of sleuthing, and finally found a solution on Apple’s own discussion boards. Apparently the problem is well known, and involves the Apple Updater application itself.

Happily, the first option I tried actually resolved the problem. As the discussion board reply noted, “Go to Add remove programs and find Apple Software update. Try repairing it. Select Change>>repair.” As soon as I completed this step, the package installed cleanly.

The biggest question is: what caused the problem in the first place? Did an Updater component get smashed somehow? Was a file removed by accident? Did some other component change a Windows Registry value that the 8.0.2 update expected to find?

I’ll probably never know, but the repair option is another tool in the diagnostic arsenal. Not all applications include this functionality, but if you’re having problems with an installed program it might be worth checking out. You might save yourself a lot of trouble and time.

As long-time readers know, my main PC is a home-built machine that’s been upgraded, both in terms of hardware and OS, repeatedly since 1998. It started off as a Windows 98 box on a Pentium II processor, and is now at XP SP2 with a 2.8 GHZ Pentium IV. The OS has been migrated (using Partition Magic) from one system disk to another without reinstalling anything.

Recently however, I thought it might be time to finally wipe and reinstall from scratch. The reason: performance. I’d had problems with delays when opening folders, especially those containing lots of different file extensions. Sometimes it might take 5 seconds to display all the files, and that was just too long. Disk defragmentation helped somewhat, as did removal of some oddball applications I’d installed long ago. But the delay was still unacceptably bad.

Today I decided to upgrade to the latest NVIDIA driver for my GeForce 7600 after getting a few BSoDs from the Omega drivers, which are supposed to be super-fast and gaming friendly. I visited the NVIDIA support site, grabbed the latest release, then uninstalled both the Omega add-ons and the base drivers they used. The usual reboot-install-reboot again sequence was followed, and the process was complete.

Guess what? The beast is now back to its old performance levels, and the folder-delay problem has vanished completely. Looking back on it, the Omega add-ons were written for base XP and haven’t been updated in about a year. I migrated to XP SP2 over the summer, which is about when the folder delay issue was first noticed.

The object lesson is that performance problems can originate in the craziest places. Upgrades to the OS can cause subtle, or not so subtle, incompatibilities to creep into any machine. If your machine has slowed down for no apparent reason, think about what you changed just before performance fell off.

Slow machines aren’t always related to hardware problems or (as many people believe) viruses. Driver incompatibilities like the one I just solved can really ruin your day.

Now that the system disk was upgraded, the rest was easy. The remaining 40GB EIDE drive was next on the list. All I needed to do here was to reformat the PC’s original 80GB SATA drive as a single NTFS partition, then I coped the whole directory tree from the EIDE drive to the SATA disk. This took about 40 minutes.

Now it was time for another shutdown and reboot. The EIDE drive was disconnected and removed (yippee, one less cable inhabiting the PC case). Then I vacuumed out the case since a lot of dust had accumulated, rebooted again, and changed the 80GB SATA drive’s letter to match the one used by the now defunct EIDE disk. This completed the disk upgrade phase.

Last but not least was the memory upgrade. This produced a surprise, since I discovered I’d accidentally mixed PC2700 (320MHZ) and PC3200 (400MHZ) memory on the bus at some point in the past. The result was that the system ran at 320MHZ. No wonder the overall memory performance wasn’t what I’d expected.

This is something to look for if you’re having performance problems even with large amounts of memory installed, since the system will always run at the refresh rate of the slowest RAM in the box unless it’s told otherwise.

I pulled the offending 320MHZ stick, added a 2nd 1GB PC3200 module, and the machine was on its way back up with 2GB of faster memory. Everything is now significantly faster overall. Disk access, window manipulation, program startup, and other tasks all appear to run more cleanly with less thrashing. Heavy duty applications like Second Life and a World War II simulation that I play occasionally are now more stable and responsive.

As a side note, be sure to keep your PC’s case clean. While working on this upgrade, I stopped at a local shop for a SATA cable and overheard a technician talking to another customer. Her 1 year old Dell’s power supply was toast. Why? Because the case as absolutely stuffed with pet fur and dust. This inhibited airflow and fried the power supply. She was lucky…it could have destroyed the CPU instead!