In Which My Computer Creaks Under Its Own Weight

[the_gneech]

One of the big themes in my life right now is scraping off clutter, finding and holding onto the things that really matter, and creating a new and clean space for one's self. We're doing that at my mom's house, as we dispose of her stuff and try to sell it in order to fund her assisted living from now until indefinitely; we're doing that at home as we dispose of a lot of our stuff in order to sell our own house in the spring (we hope).

Today, I find myself trying to do the same, for my computer. This machine, which was on the upper end of graphics and particularly game performance when I bought it a few years ago, has in the past six months become extremely choppy, laggy, and generally hard to work with, so today I'm uninstalling a bunch of old stuff, updating AVG and Malwarebytes, and generally trying to clean the digital house. It doesn't help that AVG is turning into exactly the same pushware/adware crap that once made it better than Norton, but for the moment I don't know of a better antivirus choice.

I suspect that when the time comes that this computer does become unfeasibly creaky, I will try jumping ship to a Mac. I'm loving my little Macbook Air lappy so far, and in an alternate universe I probably just bought the biggest baddest Macbook Pro I could get my hands on and made that my only computer, instead of having one for writing and one for everything else. I have been reluctant to abandon PCs, largely due to wanting backwards compatibility with old games that I've loved in the past, but looking at my actual current habits, well, there's actually nothing I do with this PC that wouldn't work just as well on a Mac, and plenty of things I am doing now that would probably work better on a newer, cleaner machine.

But, that's definitely for the future. Like, after the house is sold future. For the time being, I keep on patching up this machine. Temp file deletion time, ho!

-The Gneech

Comments

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

It's laggy, like something is chewing up the available RAM. I suspect a virus or malware, based on the performance, but I can't rule out some Windows update switching the "suck" toggle to "on" due to my lack of buying a new machine recently.

Chrome and Tweetdeck are big offenders in the slowdown, which makes me suspect memory leaks from them, as well.

The cleanup stuff I did yesterday helped somewhat. :)

-TG

[anthony-lion.livejournal.com]

Yeah, winblows updates tends to flip that switch after a while.

Doing a fresh install often cleans it up a bit, though, as some of the fixes at least has been superceeded by others, or rolled into bigger packages. (All small fixes between a X.0 and the Service Packs will be rolled up into the SP. )

and getting rid of languishing drivers and whatever crud has collected in the registry doesn't hurt, either.