Making Windows work better

Keeping your system up longer

Published on August 12, 2004 By Draginol In Personal Computing

I monitor technical support channels at Stardock on occasion and whether it be games or non-games, it seems many people, even in the age of Windows XP, tend to reboot their computers far more often than is necessary.

Generally speaking, you shouldn't have to reboot your machine. Even if it seems "hosed" odds are you just need to restart some program. This guide is by no means comprehensive but it's a good start in getting you to not have to reboot.

1) Restart Explorer. If all else fails, particularly if you're someone who customizes Windows, kill the shell (typically explorer). To do that, hit Ctrl-Shift-Esc and then go to the process list. Then select explorer.exe and kill it. Then go to the file menu and run explorer.exe to bring it back. This will solve many of your problems.

2) If your system is getting bogged down, odds are the Internet Explorer has slowly taken over. Kill off iexplore.exe processes left and right and you'll probably find your system coming back to a level of sanity.

3) Go to the task manager's "view" menu, choose "Select columns" and add virtual memory, handles, and GDI objects. Then when they're added as column headers, click on them to sort the processes by them. Find ones that are using a huge amount of them compared to the others and kill those processes. Beware, svchost.exe are wild cards. Killing them might kill your system. So kill those only as a last resort (that's where the "0 foot print" msstyles engine runs).

4) Keep your video drivers up to date. This may seem like a hassle but usually if you're running into weird video issues it's driver related. That, btw, does not mean running out and downloading the latest version when it first comes out. Let someone else be the first to try them out. What I am saying is that every half year or so you should check to see what the latest version is and get them.

5) Use MSConfig.exe (run->msconfig.exe) and go to the Start-up tab. There's often a LOT of crap that gets put in there. If it looks like junk, it probably is, try de-selecting it and then it won't boot next time. Very few things need to be loaded on start up. Quicktime, display panels, sound driver panels, and other junk can be removed to save quite a bit of memory. There's also usually plenty of registration programs floating in there.

Follow these 5 things and odds are you'll rarely have to reboot when you don't want to.

Comments (Page 1)

danioc

on Aug 12, 2004

Nice tips, thankx

kingbee

on Aug 12, 2004

this site has a fairly comprehensive sorted list of potentially troublesome processes, each with an explanation of which application or device calls or is impacted by them, a recommendation/warning and instructions (if warranted) for how to deal with it. LINK

psychx

on Aug 12, 2004

Yeah it's a pain when my comp seems to stall for no reason, right now I am using ace utilities to optimize windows but sytem mechanic has been recommended to me by a couple of friends. From what I see it's a very in-depth program giving you the ability to control many different aspects of your computer. Just haven't got around to buying it yet...

Chris Adams

on Aug 13, 2004

http://www.sysinternals.com/ has a number of highly useful tools. The psutils suite includes a very handy pskill command-line tool - I put it in C:\bin so things like a runaway Internet Explorer process can be solved by using the Windows Key + R shortcut to the Run dialog (*MUCH* faster than the mouse under load) and a quick "pskill iexplore". FileMon and RegMon monitor all file and registry access - very handy for answering those "Why is my hard drive thrashing on an 'idle' computer" questions. Autoruns gives you a convenient list of all of the different run-on-boot/logon locations and a hotkey for deleting entries.

meecrob

on Aug 13, 2004

I think you forgot about the worst computer performance destoyer of all time..... spyware/adware. A new version of ad aware just came out, get it and run it.

eieio

on Aug 13, 2004

Concerning svchost, this can be useful:

Under Windows XP Professional, you can find out what DLL-based services SVCHOST is running by typing Tasklist /SVC at a Command/MS‑DOS Prompt (this command is not available in Windows XP Home).

DesignCaddy

on Aug 13, 2004

people are always amazed when i tell them i havn't rebooted my computer in a week..

kingbee

on Aug 14, 2004

i havn't rebooted my computer in a week

mine does it--like a lotta other things connected with windows--whenever it feels the need, thus saving me the need to decide.

Sam

on Aug 15, 2004

My home computer's uptime is usually around a month, barring power outages. At work though, when I have Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator running along with Corel and Freehand, five documents open in each, plus Opera with 5-10 tabs open, plus the FTP, PC MacLan, etc etc, I find that a jab at the reset button saves me about five minutes of waiting for the churning of whatever the hell froze up to end so I can start killing processes. I just have to be sure all my stuff is saved.

The Macs here are seemingly better, the G4 has a record uptime of 71 days, all spent doing pretty heavy design work. Then again the Mac user rarely uses anything other than Freehand 10, Photoshop, and the FTP program. The PC has to deal with any and all forms of files, so I have no choice but to keep fifteen things running at once. Then again, Freehand inexplicably crashes leaving you no option to save your work, and that's only with three apps in use. The PC NEVER crashes if all I have open is Corel, and even when Corel does crash, it gives you the option of saving your work before killing itself.

The G3 running OS 9 is even wierder - we use both Freehand 8 and Freehand 10 on it, and you have to launch 8 BEFORE you launch 10, because otherwise the system freezes. If 8 crashes and terminates, time to save everything and restart the computer.

Plus I really don't mind restarting WinXP - it takes about 20 seconds. When either one of the Macs is restarting, time to go brew some coffee or have a smoke.

Daiwa

on Aug 16, 2004

- pretty funny, Brad, since every time WB or IP is updated a reboot is required!

Cheers,
Daiwa

messybuu

on Aug 18, 2004

- pretty funny, Brad, since every time WB or IP is updated a reboot is required!

Cheers,
Daiwa

I think they only need to be rebooted if you're running them during installation. If you close them, and then update them, then you won't have to reboot (at least that's the case with ObjectDock and DesktopX).

thomassen

on Jun 06, 2005

What I wonder is, with SD's products, is it really nessesary to reboot when SC asks me to? Or is it enought to Log off and then log on again?

Tarkus

on Jun 06, 2005

Well, IP is not a resident program, so that doesn't wash.

Other programs (except perhaps WB, which runs at a lower level), can simply be terminated by the installer. You know, like hundreds of other programs do when you update them.

Posted via WinCustomize Browser/Stardock Central

Phoon

on Jun 07, 2005

hit Ctrl-Shift-Esc and then go to the process list. Then select explorer.exe and kill it

That works, but the proper way to kill explorer.exe is to click start, select turn off computer, while holding down alt+ctrl+shift hit the cancel button. Bring it back up by hitting ctrl+shift+esc then hit file, new task(run) ,type explorer.exe and hit ok.

Read that on Technet somewhere...

Randomization

on Jun 07, 2005

People don't believe me when I say my ubuntulinx sytem hasn't been rebooted in 11 months.
I rebooted XP yesterday

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