Newbie question

[henryiu10]

Okay guys. I'm not big on computer knowledge, so I come here with a simple question (I hope). I have a top of the line computer, but it seems to be getting slower and slower over the months. I don't know why, but it is. What is the common way to get your computer back to par? Is there something I have to delete? I run a lot of VT-edit, Mirage, and LW but thats about it. Hopefully I'll get a better answer here than I get from my VT-dealer...which is to "Defrag". Thats got me nowhere.

[NVentive]

Hey Henry --

Help us out a little here. Is your machine on the internet very often? Have you added or deleted anything new lately?
If your machine is on the 'net, you could have picked up some parasites. If you're running programs like Norten and etc, that can add a lot of steps to your computer's daily life and slow things down quite a bit. If you've added and/or deleted things, you could have goober in your registry.
And then, of course, there's the ...ahm...windows problem. I know people who actually re-format their drives every six months just to keep their machines running well.
I wish there was an easy answer.....there are some little utilities out there that can help chase things down. If you need some links let me know and I'll send them along. Good Luck --

Stephen Self
Obfustication Manager
www.n-ventivetv.com

[SBowie]

You might want to check your drives (and array, if you have one) for fragmentation.

[KiloWatkins]

Also, to help this further after answering Stephen's questions, are you keeping as much freespace as possible on C:? Redirection of Cache or Temp directories for your programs to Video or slave drives?

Start>run then type dxdiag, when the screen pops up, check the box bottom left for WHQL, when that is finished, to the right, SaveInformation and attach or copy and paste back, will help others see what your machine is.

If your video comes over a network, try copy and pasting to the video or slave drive to work on it.

GoodLuck