Monday, August 1, 2011

Fixing Old Laptops

For the last ten years, I've been the computer guy in the family.  That means when I'm home or visiting friends, there's an awkward moment after "How have you been?" and before "So, my computer..."

Last week, I went up to see my sister-in-law and her family, and her girls were complaining about their old "homework" laptop.  It was essentially the same hardware as my ThinkPad x41t, which actually can manage to run Windows 7 Ultimate.  That being said, with Windows XP on a Pentium M with a 4500RPM IDE drive, things just aren't going to be that fast.  And there was malware involved.  So where do we start?


Disclaimer: By following any of these activities you hold the author harmless of any effects, averse or otherwise.  There's no fitness or guarantee for this information. 

Safe Mode Cleaning

First, boot the computer into Safe Mode with Networking.  At this point, I like to cleanup as much temporary data as possible to reduce malware removal tool scan time.  Tools like Piriform's CCleaner work great to clean up the local profile.  If you need to clean other user profiles, you're on your own or logging in and out several times to run the tool.

Following up with a scan with tools like Malwarebytes (a current favorite) and you've got a head start on the malware problem.

Additionally, I typically like to check a few registry locations, however the majority of the startup items can be located by TrendMicro's Hijackthis tool.  Be cautious as many of the keys it enumerates are, in fact, supposed to exist.

Disk Problems

In safe mode, you can also check the health of the logical disk using chkdsk.  If I'm having a performance issue loading or opening programs, it's important to confirm that you're not getting disk read errors causing re-reads.  Realistically, the speed at which disks operate today actually causes more read errors that you know, but there's automatic disk correction occurring under the hood.  What I'm looking for is significant logical errors on the disk, which can also mean pending disk failure.

If chkdsk reports more errors than a volume bitmap error, then I'll schedule a chkdsk /f on the next reboot to get those index errors repaired.

Useless Programs and Features

Once back in Windows, I'll load up Add and Remove Programs and audit the installed applications.  Frequently there's a plethora of toolbars, which can slow down browser performance.  Occasionally, there's two versions of Java, which I recommend running only the latest, most up-to-date version, unless you have an application compatibility issue, such as using the web management software for Cisco PIX firewalls (Requires Java SE 1.4.14, I believe).

The biggest culprit I see slowing down older hardware running Windows XP is the Windows Desktop Search 4.0 feature that's installed via Windows Update.  It's a great tool, and I leverage it on my Windows 7 workstation, but that's newer hardware.  It's the Microsoft equivalent to Google Desktop.  If you don't need it, then you don't need it crawling across your slow disk, reading and indexing files in the background.

Defragmentation

Speaking of disks, how about defragmenting?  Diskeeper swears by it as a performance tool, however the measurable results can be negligible.  Rather, if you have the option to re-install Windows from scratch and happen to have a Windows 7 install CD lying around, consider using it to pre-format your disks for your Windows XP install so that you can take advantage of disk partition alignment, which applies not only to servers, but to workstations.

As for actually defragmenting, I prefer both Piriform's Defraggler and Sysinternal's contig.  The former allows for a more efficient whole disk defragmentation including defragmenting free-space.  Both utilities allow for single-file defragmentation.

Additionally, some system files, namely the paging file and registry hives, cannot be defragmented in user-mode.  Instead, you could defragment free space, set your paging file to zero, reboot, set your paging file back to a 1:1 ratio with you physical memory, and reboot again, hoping that the file will be created in contiguous free space.  Or you could just use PageDefrag.  The tool does a boot-time defrag of the paging file and registry hives, just like a chkdsk /f.  I don't run this tool on a regular basis, but only when I'm being incredibly aggressive with my disk fragmentation.

General System Optimizations

Do you really need those fancy themes?  Or Fast User Switching on a computer with a single account?

Right clicking My Computer and selecting properties brings up all the tabs we need.  Under the Remote tab, are you even using Remote Desktop or Remote Assistance?  How about unchecking the option?  How about System Restore?  Checking the turn off box will also clear out the disk space it uses, where old malware files tend to hide.

The Advanced tab is where the real magic happens.  For Performance settings, set to Adjust for best performance.  You'll lose that fancy blue color, but it's a few less bitmaps to load into memory.  Switch over to the Advanced tab under Peformance, and click on Change to set your page file size.  Regardless of the size you set (I prefer a 1:1 ratio to physical memory), you should set the Custom Size minimum and maximum to the same size.  Why should Windows waste disk IO and CPU resources managing and resizing the paging file?  Don't forget to click Set to actually apply the setting, and then later reboot.  If you can put the paging file on a different volume that resides on a different physical disk, you can experience improved performance.

Under the Startup and Recovery section of the Advanced tab is also where you control the BSOD actions. If at all possible set it to not automatically reboot and to write a full memory dump.  This allows you to use tools like Nirsoft's BlueScreenView to inspect the root cause of the crash. (It's left as an exercise to the reader to learn about Crash Dump Analysis.)

The next stop is services.msc.  Now that we've got the windowing system down to the minimums, does the Themes service need to be running?  Nah, let's set it to Stopped and Disabled.  And if we're using a single account on the system, stop and disable Fast User Switching.  What about Windows Wireless Zero Configuration on a desktop system?  Or Print Spooler?  If you disabled System Restore earlier, you can also disable the service.  Windows Indexer?  Windows Search? (Which you hopefully uninstalled already.)  Be very judicious about disabling services though, as some of the dependencies are not as obvious and your risk creating an unstable system.

The End Result

Once I went through all of these items, I was able to reduce CPU usage, stabilize a dying disk, and reduce memory utilization by a whopping 50%.  The main problems I found were malware, logical disk corruption, and Windows Search causing high IO.

1 comment:

  1. CCleaner's add/remove programs is a lot better than the built-in control panel applet. It also lets you launch multiple (un)installers simultaneously whereas the built-in Windows applet doesn't. The registry cleaner in CCleaner is also top-notch. I usually kill every orphaned dll and entry it finds with zero negative side effects. I also typically go through the startup option in CCleaner and disable items. I do not delete them as the applications will often respawn the entry. Disabling them keeps them from coming back. I usually do this with startup items like: Flash updater, java updater, reader quickstarter, google updater, etc... Just to name a few.

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