Hello Nick,

05 Mar 17 00:35 at you wrote to Mike Powell:

 NA> HijackThis 1.99 as Administrator to more accurately contro what is
 NA> loaded on system startup.

msconfig will do the same thing without an additional program being installed.

 NA> I guarantee you as someone troubleshooting Windows computers for 18+
 NA> years my two suggestions will give you an idea of whats going on. I
 NA> strongly advise against running CCleaner or other utilities until it
 NA> can be determined exactly what is causing the "slowdown".

A lot of my time in my own 30+ years of experience in supporting over 2000 
machines at a time is that Windows can't wipe its own ass.  Sometimes just 
cleaning up Windows' temp directories and a reboot will do wonders.

I can also "guarantee" you that if you look around enough, you'll find 
Microsoft admitting Windows is messy and needs its ass wiped every few months.

 NA> DO NOT, under ANY circumstances, run "snake oil" programs like
 NA> registry defragmenters, registry cleaners, etc.

That's funny that you say that since Windows does leave a lot of crap in the 
registry that can cause problems.  You can make a backup of the registry 
before you clean it.

I'm assuming you've never used DarT for working on Windows computers either 
and that you know what DarT is...

I've resurrected several systems during my various IT jobs that were supposed 
to undergo a reimage just by cleaning up Windows' temp directories and junk 
left in its registry.

 NA> customer's computer that "runs slow". Run a drive S.M.A.R.T. status

SMART is unreliable for the most part.  I'd not recommend relying on SMART at 
all but doing a thorough disk examination for bad clusters, et cetera.  If you 
have more than three bad clusters in a physical block, I'd start worrying 
about that.

From Google's own analysis of its hard drives:
https://research.google.com/pubs/pub32774.htm...

"Our analysis identifies several parameters from the drive's self monitoring 
facility (SMART) that correlate highly with failures. Despite this high 
correlation, we conclude that models based on SMART parameters alone are 
unlikely to be useful for predicting individual drive failures. Surprisingly, 
we found that temperature and activity levels were much less correlated with 
drive failures than previously reported."

I'm really surprised that you're giving out bad advice.  DarT, Microsoft's own 
toolset, includes a registry cleaner.  So are you going to say that 
Microsoft's giving out "snake oil" or just admit that you'd talking out one 
side of your mouth about my advice?

Later,
Sean

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