PC Discussion

Greetings.

I'm new to PC (Mac desktop; PC laptop) and have a couple questions.
First, I have a Toshiba laptop (2.8 Ghz 1 MB RAM) and, although it boots in a reasonable time, it takes a very long time (about 2 minutes) from there to opening Firefox, which is my only start up program, and, aside from that, all I ever use is MS Office. I looked at the start up inspector, and did not find anything that looked like a problem, and also checked for what might be running in the background. The only other program I have running (unless I open another) is Sophos antivirus. As this takes much longer than my Mac, I assume there's a problem. Any ideas on what's going on, how to diagnose and/or correct it?

Second, I'm unclear what protection and maintenance I need. As mentioned, I have Sophos antivirus (company license); I also have CCleaner, Glary Utilities, Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, Ad-Aware, Spybot Search, SmitfraudFix, and Defraggler. It seems like over-kill to run all of these, so I don't know which to keep and then which to run in what sequence.

Your assistance is appreciated.

Malwarebytes, Ad-Aware, Spybot Search, SmitfraudFix along with Sophos is a little overkill.

More RAM would help a small amount. I think my brother has a nearly identical Toshiba (Mobile P4?). How full is your hard drive? Have you used Defraggler and CCleaner recently? Firefox still has some bugs. My history retention is only three weeks but I see sites that are not bookmarked or that I have visited in 3 months when I type URL's in the address bar. How big is your bookmarks file? My guess the cause is a combination of: cached files that need dumping, lots of bookmarks in the root folder, history retention period too long, too many plugins, and the Downloads list needs clearing.

First Clear the Downloads pane. If that does not help much change the History retention to the bare minimum, close Firefox, restart, run CCleaner, then see how long it takes. You still might need to delete some things manually. I do not use CCleaner so this is one folder I will sometimes rip out manually but you might need to download some temp media players (like abc.go.com).
C:\Documents and Settings\user_name\Local Settings\Temp

It might be faster uninstall and reinstall Firefox. Make sure to back up your bookmarks and get a record of Add-ons before you do (Firefox>Tools>Add-ons and take a screenshot of plugins and extensions), use Add or Remove Programs to delete Firefox, restart, then install it again.



From a Raines Cohen T-Shirt: "The day Microsoft makes a product that
does not suck will be the day they start making vacuum cleaners."

FWIW, I find when I boot into my WinXP partition on my MacBook Pro that it takes FOREVER to do anything useful, even after the desktop has initially popped up. Definitely much longer than a Mac. (And this is on XP, I suspect that if you have Vista it is worse).

One thing that also might be contributing to this is Windows Update. It seems to me that as soon as I boot up every time, Windows is automatically checking for updates. Depending upon how you have your automatic update settings, Windows might be scanning your computer, contacting the Microsoft website to look for updates, and then automatically downloading and installing those updates. If you have updates set to load & install automatically (which is the default setting), then all of this will be taking place in the background without you necessarily knowing any of it is happening. Yet all the while, it is hogging a large portion of your processing power as well as your internet bandwith. Both factors could lead to a very sluggish Firefox performance upon opening.

WU is a possibility but I got the impression that other programs were not delayed as much. I have WU turned off. M$ changed how often updates are released. It is only once a month (second Tuesday) unless there is an active zero day exploit.


From a Raines Cohen T-Shirt: "The day Microsoft makes a product that
does not suck will be the day they start making vacuum cleaners."