Friday, January 09, 2009

Is your XP PC slow? This may be the soloution

Over the past year or so, I have really started to see a dramatic downturn in the overall performance of my work laptop running Windows XP. Slow start-up, slow program start and even slow web browsing had gotten so bad that it was painful to try to do just about anything and expect a quick response.

I started to look for solutions. The first thing I did was defrag and it helped, but only in terms of file retrieval. Then I downloaded a pair of anti-malware/spyware programs and scanned my computer. These programs remove malicious software from your computer that may be gobbling up memory and even sending out your personal information without your knowledge. Scary Stuff!
I used and really like these two Freeware programs, Malwarebytes and Spybot Search and Destroy. They worked well and despite having a very good handle on what sites I visit and monitoring what comes into my system, the programs found and removed hundreds of these little corrupt files. With this I saw a noticeable performance boost, but still not back to the lightning fast response time I was once getting.

Then I found FreeRAM XP Pro and everything changed. This program works in the background and manages you RAM or "working memory", allocating more if the demand is higher. Very cool! I just followed the simple instructions for set-up...

"Even if you're not a RAM whiz, you can still easily free up RAM on your running system? By selecting AutoFree mode and then 'go,' FreeRAM XP Pro can automatically optimize your system, balancing levels between your memory cache and the computer's speed."

It was really that easy and the performance boost for web surfing, DVD burning and multitasking large programs is incredible! What a simple and great program that I can't recommend enough to anyone running a Windows XP OS.

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