Why Isn't The Computer Doing The Heavy Lifting?

I'm in a mood to rant. In a small company sits a PC that is in constant use throughout the day. This PC is about a year old, has 1GB of RAM and is on a small network. Installed on it is a well-known antivirus product that is always up to date. Also on this system are three different anti-spyware products. They each run a scan every day. The hard drive is defragmented twice a week. The hosts file has not been hijacked. No third-party toolbars are installed in the browser. All Windows and IE patches are applied. There's no desktop search application (anymore) that's constantly indexing system content and creating an index file many gigabytes in size.

So why is this system running slower than cold molasses?

The PC is mine. No one else uses this system. At the moment, it's running in Safe Mode and doing just fine. But boot it up normally and you can go out for lunch and a walk in the park as it processes a single mouse click or a character typed on the keyboard. Simply booting up takes nearly 15 minutes. And shutting down? Well, it won't.

Now sure, you could say this is my fault, because I'm constantly installing, uninstalling, and re-installing products that various vendors send me for evaluation purposes, hoping I'll write nice things. The problem with that, of course, is that no company wants its product uninstalled. So they never write an uninstall routine that truly removes everything.

Installed and running are what seems like a zillion tiny agents. They load when the PC starts. One checks the ink level in a locally attached inkjet printer. Another syncs my PDA. Another tells me the weather (can't I just look out the window?). Another wakes up when I plug my digital camera into a USB port. There's one that starts the file-backup process at 3:00 a.m. Another defrags the drive. Another updates virus definitions. You get the picture.

The Add/Remove Programs dialog lists software I've never heard of. Often, these are utilities that come with a product I had an interest in. Sometimes they're not. Some won't uninstall even when invoking that very process.

The Processes tab on the Windows Task Manager still lists items from products uninstalled long ago (that is, after you take the time to hunt down and identify them with no help from Windows). And the registry --- well, let's just say there are many, many entries that belong to nothing that's currently on the PC.

It's a mess. There ought to be a law.

In the old days, we'd simply reformat the hard drive, re-install Windows and go from there. But in this age of installation keys and product activations, it's not that simple.

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