Windows 7 slowing down

On Thu, 02 Mar 2017 10:43:53 -0700, Ken Blake
wrote:

On Wed, 01 Mar 2017 19:33:55 -0800, Justin Tyme
wrote:


I am not surprised that your 5 year old install is getting slow.
Systems need to be cleaned after time.


Only if they haven't been maintained well.


Usually they have not been maintained well. That's why they are here
asking for help.

Firefox slowing down is often
caused by toolbars and other potentially unwanted programs (PUPS) that
you have installed over the years.


Yes, but if you have been careful, that will happen very rarely and
good maintenance will clean the crud off soon after it gets there.

The regular users of this group are probably an exception. Many
computer users are not careful at all as they don't really understand
Windows. My daughter, for example, is happy as long as Facebook works.
She cares little about maintaining the system. It seems to me that
very few people read the dialog when installing software. There are
often boxes that have to be unchecked or a potentially unwanted
program will be installed along with the desired program. Just about
every computer that I work on has a copy of McAfee or some other PUP
and several toolbars plus other assorted junk. Often their home page
has been changed. Most have Chrome installed but they don't use it or
remember how it got installed. If they just read the install dialog
and unchecked the boxes that install PUPs this would not happen.

Another problem is that users install free programs they find when
surfing the net. I ask what do you do with this program that they have
installed and the reply is they have no clue what it does or even how
it got installed. I find numerous garbage programs on the computers I
fix. This junk will compete for resources, so it is no great surprise
that their computers are slow. The OP mentioned Firefox being slow. If
Firefox and Windows are slow that is an indication to me that I should
check for malware.

If the slowness still exists after cleaning the malware then I will
look at the other causes. I follow the K.I.S.S. rule and fix the most
obvious things first. I leave the exotic possibilities until last
because IME it is usually something simple that is the problem.

Your computer is getting plugged up with old crud


Likely true.


and MS Security Essentials is the worst anti virus
program there is.


I don't agree. There are better choices, but Microsoft Security
Essentials isn't terrible.

Maybe not terrible but most experienced users would not use it. That
tells me something. Do you use and rely on MS Security Essentials? I
doubt it.




You probably have other malware as well. Avast
free is a better choice.


Yes.

Except for the sentence "MS Security Essentials is a POS," I generally
agree with all that I quoted below.


You need to clean up your computer.

1- Run cCleaner to clean out your temp files etc. Malware often
resides in the temp folder. Don't use cCleaner registry tools.
Opinions vary but why take a chance with a registry cleaner.

2- Run a scan with Hitman Pro or adwcleaner to clean out all the old
toolbars and PUPS. I like Hitman Pro, you can get a demo for a one
time use. Adwcleaner is good too but make sure you read what is about
to be deleted. Adwcleaner can be a bit aggressive.

3-Run a scan with Malwarebytes.

4- Run a scan with your AV. Hopefully not a MS AV program. MS Security
Essentials is a POS. I like paid AV programs but Avast free is
probably good for you.

5-If Autoruns is too much for you then run cCleaner and go to Tools.
You will find a Startup tab. Go through the list of Startup Programs
and disable everything that is not essential. You can also disable
Starup programs by starting a command prompt and type/run MSCONFIG.
You will see a Startup tab, disable all non essential items. This will
help boot time.

Your slow running Firefox is no doubt caused by system crud, toolbars
and other PUPS and malware. You should also take a good look at the
Firefox addons. Get rid of any addon you don't need.
--
JT

On Thu, 02 Mar 2017 10:48:24 -0700, Ken Blake wrote:

On Thu, 02 Mar 2017 01:55:11 -0800, Justin Tyme
wrote:

5-If Autoruns is too much for you then run cCleaner and go to Tools.
You will find a Startup tab. Go through the list of Startup Programs
and disable everything that is not essential. You can also disable
Starup programs by starting a command prompt and type/run MSCONFIG.

Should be: Start select Run and type: msconfig
Command prompt works too but Run is the proper method.


"Proper method"? There is no proper method. Both methods have exactly
the same result, and it doesn't matter at all which one you use.

A third choice: Windows key + R, and then type msconfig. Also
identical to the other two, and just as good.

Arguably better, because it's fewer keystrokes. :-)

Also: Click the start button, type "msconfig" (without quotes), and
press Enter.

It's usually true in Windows, that there are usually several ways to
do a given thing. And you're 100% right that they all have the same
result.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://BrownMath.com/
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
Shikata ga nai...

On Thu, 02 Mar 2017 12:23:21 -0800, Justin Tyme
wrote:

On Thu, 02 Mar 2017 10:43:53 -0700, Ken Blake
wrote:

On Wed, 01 Mar 2017 19:33:55 -0800, Justin Tyme
wrote:


I am not surprised that your 5 year old install is getting slow.
Systems need to be cleaned after time.


Only if they haven't been maintained well.


Usually they have not been maintained well. That's why they are here
asking for help.


Yes, but that's a very different statement from your earlier one.


Firefox slowing down is often
caused by toolbars and other potentially unwanted programs (PUPS) that
you have installed over the years.


Yes, but if you have been careful, that will happen very rarely and
good maintenance will clean the crud off soon after it gets there.

The regular users of this group are probably an exception.


Many of hem here are, yes. But not all.


Many
computer users are not careful at all as they don't really understand
Windows.


Change "many " to "most" and I agree with you. My point was that your
statements made it sound like you meant everybody, and I disagree with
that.




and MS Security Essentials is the worst anti virus
program there is.


I don't agree. There are better choices, but Microsoft Security
Essentials isn't terrible.

Maybe not terrible but most experienced users would not use it.


I agree with that. But that's a much milder statement that your
earlier one with which I disagreed.


That
tells me something. Do you use and rely on MS Security Essentials? I
doubt it.



No, I don't.

On 3/2/2017 3:38 AM, Paul wrote:
mike wrote:
On 3/2/2017 12:39 AM, Mike S wrote:
On 3/1/2017 3:42 AM, David B. wrote:
On 01/03/2017 06:29, Walter E. wrote:


"Mike S" wrote in message
news On 2/28/2017 7:22 PM, Paul in Houston TX wrote:
masonc wrote:
On Sun, 26 Feb 2017 12:44:04 -0600, Paul in Houston TX
wrote:

Walter E. wrote:
My 5 year old install of Windows 7 seems to be slowing down,
especially my Firefox
browser. Is there an easy way to perk it up a bit?

When I recently ran my virus checker (Security essentials) on my
c:\drive. it said it
checked about 700,000 files. That seems like a lot of files on my
(personal use) computer.
Is this normal?

Thanks

Walter

Possible tons of junk loading at startup.
Download Autoruns and see what auto runs.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/.../bb963902.aspx

Holy Cows ! How am I supposed to select junk from those 7384+
things?
Is this a computer joke? taw


I run Autoruns periodically to see what is starting up and stop the
ones
that I don't want starting. Some of them I have to look up to see
what
they are, but not many.

Please define what slowing down means. Windows boot/shutdown times
are
slowing down? Firefox takes longer to load? What exactly are you
describing, and how much (in seconds) have things slowed down?


When I connect to Google, it takes about 5 seconds for the website to
open up. It used to take only 2 seconds after I click on Google.

Walter,

What browser are you using to get to Google?

Have you cleared your cache (deleted all your history)?

https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?sourc...rowser+cache&*



Also, if you ping your ISP what ping times do you see?

And if you google "speed test" and click the blue button what kinds of
speeds do you see?


I'm not sure speedtests help.
If I run a speedtest or download a big file, it always ends up at
the advertised 30 Mbps. But, if you look at the graph, it starts out
slow and takes a few seconds to ramp up.
When you load a webpage, it loads a cascade of pages loading other pages
loading ads that load other pages. Everything is happening down at the
low initial speed. Running the network meter gadget shows that, except
for single big file downloads, network activity never gets anywhere near
the rated network speed.
I have fiber. My friend has Comcast cable and has the same experience.
I went down to the FIOS store and asked about it. Technician admitted
the issue and said everybody does it and it can't be helped.

I'm not sure that even that is the primary issue. Most of the delay
seems to happen when there's no network activity and low cpu usage.
It's like we're waiting for something to time out before moving on.

Firefox locked up several times today.
I just installed Opera browser. We'll see how that goes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Http#P...nt_connections

"Persistent Connections

In HTTP/0.9 and 1.0, the connection is closed after a single
request/response pair. In HTTP/1.1 a keep-alive-mechanism was
introduced,
where a connection could be reused for more than one request. Such
persistent connections reduce request latency perceptibly, because
the client does not need to re-negotiate the TCP 3-Way-Handshake
connection after the first request has been sent. Another positive
side effect is that in general the connection becomes faster with
time due to TCP's slow-start-mechanism.
"

That doesn't solve cross-site issues, but it's a start.

I also ran into a site the other day, where the main HTML file
seemed to have a bunch of files inside it. Which appears to be
a further optimization. I could see HTML, JS, and CSS all in
the same file.

Firefox has the ability to report trouble to Mozilla.
and that's a mechanism outside of anything Windows provides
(.dmp files).

I've already mentioned disabling GPU hardware acceleration for
Firefox and Flash.

Another thing Firefox has is Electrolysis, which is the name
of the project that added multiple processes. This is for
process isolation (and also to remain feature competitive with
Chrome). There should be an about:config option to disable
Electrolysis, as the rollout of the feature had some people
with it enabled, others with it disabled.

Opera has the old and a new version, and likely a change of
web engine. I think I'm still running the old one. The new
one uses Blink, and Wikipedia says that's the same as Chrome
(but of course, without the rest of the Chrome baggage).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(layout_engine)

Paul

I recommended Opera to a friend who had been using IE (on w7) but had
lots of crashes, and didn't want FF, Opera works great for him.

If you create a new user profile in FF and use that, with no add-ons, is
it more responsive?

Have you ever optimized FF for speed?

Mike S wrote:


Have you ever optimized FF for speed?

The fastest way to optimize Firefox,
is to use another browser :-)

Paul

On Thu, 2 Mar 2017 18:36:04 -0500, Stan Brown
wrote:

On Thu, 02 Mar 2017 10:48:24 -0700, Ken Blake wrote:

On Thu, 02 Mar 2017 01:55:11 -0800, Justin Tyme
wrote:

5-If Autoruns is too much for you then run cCleaner and go to Tools.
You will find a Startup tab. Go through the list of Startup Programs
and disable everything that is not essential. You can also disable
Starup programs by starting a command prompt and type/run MSCONFIG.

Should be: Start select Run and type: msconfig
Command prompt works too but Run is the proper method.


"Proper method"? There is no proper method. Both methods have exactly
the same result, and it doesn't matter at all which one you use.

A third choice: Windows key + R, and then type msconfig. Also
identical to the other two, and just as good.

Arguably better, because it's fewer keystrokes. :-)

Also: Click the start button, type "msconfig" (without quotes), and
press Enter.

It's usually true in Windows, that there are usually several ways to
do a given thing. And you're 100% right that they all have the same
result.

To explain my confusion, I actually don't type commands much at all. I
have a technicians usb with everything I need to fix any computer. I
have all my commands as .bat files so it only takes a couple of clicks
to run any command. The computers that I fix are often brutally slow
and hard to navigate so it is easier to run commands from .bat files
on the usb.
--
JT

En el artículo , Justin Tyme
escribió:

Maybe not terrible but most experienced users would not use it.

Nonsense. It's a perfectly good basic anti-virus.

Some of the commercial anti-virus suites are worse than viruses
themselves - bloated crap that hogs resources, slows the machine down,
of dubious worth, and wanting you to flex the credit card for
subscriptions.

As other posters have said, it's a good idea to also run Malwarebytes
and adwCleaner scans occasionally.

--
(\_/)
(='.'=) systemd: the Linux version of Windows 10
(")_(")

On 3/2/2017 5:37 PM, Paul wrote:
Mike S wrote:


Have you ever optimized FF for speed?

The fastest way to optimize Firefox,
is to use another browser :-)

Paul

Personally I use Pale Moon instead of FF.

On Fri, 3 Mar 2017 18:21:32 -0800, Mike S wrote:


Personally I use Pale Moon instead of FF.


I tried Pale Moon a couple of weeks ago. I generally liked it, but
gave up and went back to FireFox because several extensions I wanted
to use wouldn't work with it.