I already clean the Registry regularly. I can't see how a broken shortcut can slow things down, just fail when you invoke them.

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

If only I could continue to use XP but my (> 10 year) old XP PCs are now so sluggardy. What is it about OSs that make them go slower over time?

i am not sure if they really do slow down that much, mucking about with the registry is not advisable and these software that says they make your computer faster by so called optimising the registry is just a swizz. Defrag the drive will help speed the machine up, Xp it is not automatic so need to be done manually,
I think as computers get older we want things to go faster we see faster machines and our old machines seem slow.
Saying that my old machine before this one was still super fast for a 5 year old machine.

In reply to a post by Nervous:

Things like the registry clutter that builds up over time and broken shortcuts in the system.

Try a 30 day trial of AVG PC Tune UP which will clean up these things.

You have to take into account while the trial is 30 days they will take payment 14 days before trial ends so use PayPal and if your not interested in buying cancel after 10 days in your PayPal account.

I would not touch it, these tune up software are just a total waste of money.

Suit yourself.

NT Registry Optimizer was written by M$.

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

What is it about OSs that make them go slower over time?

Unnecessary processes, services, scheduled tasks and programs. Get CCleaner, swot up on what you have running and whether you need it on / enabled / autostart, and disable or uninstall.

I have 16 of 22 startup items disabled, 6 of 7 scheduled tasks disabled, and if necessary, I could make it 18 and 7 respectively, if I didn't want a personalised startup. The four 'necessary ones' are 3rd party keyboard, mouse, security and audio software.

Processes (not including this browser and the task manager) - 10.

Services - 39 Auto, 4 Auto(DS), 11 disabled, 124 manual (they start when a program requests them).

Vista 64 with boot up memory usage of about 1.1GB out of 6GB. SSD boot time of 22 seconds on a three year old system.

It's all about taking back your hardware from your software. Ok, so there might be superfetch (a good thing - not sure if it's worth it on XP), but it's going to be next to useless if you're maxing out your RAM on boot up due to 100 processes that all want to be on at startup.

I used to offer folk help with this, but so few folk believe that their setup is the problem. They think that chucking more RAM and HDD space at the problem is the answer. Or upgrading to the latest version of a one size fits all operating system. And the last thing you ever want to install are programs that 'speed up the system' (other than ones that delete or disable things). They just add to the load.

Said it all before - http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/windows/t/4227430-r...

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

i am not sure if they really do slow down that much

They definitely do slow down and a large difference can usually be seen by doing a clean install of an OS. However, I am not sure I would risk that with XP as I suspect that the MS download servers no longer provide any patches for XP and so it would only be patched to the point of the install media and that could be very old.

In reply to a post by ian72:

However, I am not sure I would risk that with XP as I suspect that the MS download servers no longer provide any patches for XP and so it would only be patched to the point of the install media and that could be very old.

Windows Update stills carries legacy Windows NT patches from Windows 2000 onward, so after installation they can be updated to the point extended support ended (not that I'd ever recommend running an OS out of its support lifecycle).

Thanks, wasn't sure if MS still carried them as haven't run an unsupported OS for a long time.