System optimizers?

M

Mnx4

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jul 29, 2005
Messages
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I'm trying to keep my laptop up on it's last legs. Windows 7 Toshiba laptop. I use it for work, email, MSoffice, surfing, maybe the occasional snes emulator during a boring meeting.

So are they any actual decent system optimizer programs out there or is it just snake oil? I do use CCleaner and Defraggler, MBAM, SAS, but don't know what else to use. Did a format fairly recently.

My main complaint is the startup caused by waking up from a hibernate state, if that can be fixed at all.

Thanks.
 
It's all snake oil, seriously. If you need a really clean system, do a clean install and pay careful attention to the applications/programs/etc you install after that point. Adding more software onto a computer is not the way to improve performance, basically. Windows does a remarkably good job of taking care of itself if you leave it alone and just make use of it as is, believe it or not.

Not sure what you mean by the hibernate comment; hibernation can be disabled entirely if it's of no use to use as sleep/standby will bring the machine back to a working state in just a few seconds, hibernate takes longer because it's literally copying the contents of RAM to the storage and then reading it back - sleep/standby keeps power supplied to the RAM while most everything else is off (this is why sleep/standby has a slight power drain compared to hibernate which powers the laptop down entirely).

If you want to disable hibernation completely, open an Administrative Command Prompt (fastest way: click Start or tap the Windows key, type cmd and wait a second or two, when cmd.exe appears at the top hold the Shift and Control keys and tap Enter, click Yes on the UAC prompt) and enter this command:

powercfg -h off (then press Enter)
Click to expand...

That will disable the hibernation subsystem and also give back some storage space that was consumed by the hibernate file (usually equal to installed system RAM but sometimes less).
 
What's the issue with waking up from hybernation? You can turn off hybernation and use just sleep instead. Doing that will gain a few GB of HDD space back too, open cmd as admin and type the following if you want hybernation off: powercfg - h off

There are some tweak tools that will delete more than crapcleaner does but that won't make your laptop faster and they are more risky to use too if you use them to clean the registry. Best thing is to use crapcleaner tool for startup items and stop anything you don't need auto-loading on boot up. That is what usually slows things down, apps that autoload crap you don't really need. If you want to check out some tweak tools then check these out, just create a system restore point before using them.

Tweaking.com Programs

Puran Utilities - Optimize your PC for best performance

NirLauncher - Collection of more than 200 portable utilities from NirSoft
 
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SSD + Clean OS install. You will thank me later. Toshiba hard drives (especially around that timeframe) were notoriously slow and failure prone. That's your main problem.

Oh yeah, and agreed with the above. System "optimizers" are snake oil for most purposes these days. Back when you had very little RAM and upgrades were expensive, they could come in handy. Nowadays, not so much.
 
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Thanks for the replies.

Because it's old, the battery life isn't that great on sleep. If I know it's going to be more than 1 hour before I open my laptop again, I choose hibernate. The issue I was having with hibernate is that when I wake up the laptop, it takes a good 3 minutes of disk activity before it allows me to do anything. Maybe it'll just be better to shut down?
Perhaps I should just save the headache and do another format/install...
 
Mnx4 said:
Thanks for the replies.

Because it's old, the battery life isn't that great on sleep. If I know it's going to be more than 1 hour before I open my laptop again, I choose hibernate. The issue I was having with hibernate is that when I wake up the laptop, it takes a good 3 minutes of disk activity before it allows me to do anything. Maybe it'll just be better to shut down?
Perhaps I should just save the headache and do another format/install...
Click to expand...

I've had a lot of systems where it's faster to do a clean boot than it is to use hibernate, and sometimes even sleep.
 
Just for shits and giggles, run crystaldiskinfo or something similar and check your disk's SMART data. I bet it's not doing too well.
 
The problem is even if you have all services disabled and the system is sitting at 0% idle ... webpages and applications are still going to run like crap on an old CPU. No amount of optimizing will fix it if it's bottle necking with just a web browser.
 
Mnx4 said:
Thanks for the replies.

Because it's old, the battery life isn't that great on sleep. If I know it's going to be more than 1 hour before I open my laptop again, I choose hibernate. The issue I was having with hibernate is that when I wake up the laptop, it takes a good 3 minutes of disk activity before it allows me to do anything. Maybe it'll just be better to shut down?
Perhaps I should just save the headache and do another format/install...
Click to expand...

Hibernate saves system state to a huge file so has to read it back in. Better off doing what I said to disable it and use sleep or shutdown instead.

check this out: SlimCleaner 4.0.30422 - Software reviews, downloads, news, free trials, freeware and full commercial software - Downloadcrew

Lots of other tweaknut tools at that site too.

Try this to see which processes are slowing things down, if any are.

Wise System Monitor 1.41.36 - Software reviews, downloads, news, free trials, freeware and full commercial software - Downloadcrew
 
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Got another handy tool for you. This adds entries to CCleaner that makes it much more powerful. I tried it yesterday and it works as advertised.

CCEnhancer
 
Iolo system mechanic is quite good. All in one optimisation tool.
 
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