What is more effective for reviving performance - cleanup utilities or reinstalling the OS?

Question

My 1.5 year old Toshiba Net Book running Windows 7 is slowing down. Will running clean-up utilities or re-installing Windows be more effective for reviving its performance?

Answer 1

A reinstall will assure a "clean slate" while a utility can help only to a limited extent.

Utilities generally are somewhat limited in what they clean up to avoid breaking applications or worse. They can be a good start, but a reinstall will usually be better

Answer 2

The only way to keep good performances with a PC is to perform maintenance on regular basis such as:

• Checking S.M.A.R.T. data of your HD and if the result is "good": then Running CHKDSK

  Suggested tools: Piriform Speccy or SpeedFan (there's an online s.m.a.r.t. tool)

• Suppress unused softwares and UNutilities

• Run Windows disk cleaner or BleachBit or Ccleaner (but avoid Registry "cleanup")

• Defragment the volumes of the HD :Suggested tools: Windows defrag or Piriform Defraggler or Auslogic Defragmenter or Ms TechNet Sysinternals contig

• Update Windows and applications: Suggested tool: Secunia Software inspector

• You may also check for PC temperatures and clean dust accumulated in the box...

Finally take a look at MS FixIt Center: Fix Windows system performance problems on slow Windows computers

http://support.microsoft.com/mats/slow_windows_performance/en-us

Hope this help. Let us know. :)

Answer 3

"Registry cleaners" don't help appreciably, and can hurt by breaking needed connections. If you're going to re-install, it's a non-issue anyway.

I'll add that even a fresh install needs to be defragmented. When everything else is finished (win-updates, etc), run a good defrag program. I use MyDefrag.

Trim your startups. I like Autoruns from Sysinternals.