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?
3 Answers
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
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. :)
"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.