Why is my PC grinding to a halt?

[pickupthismess]

I've suddenly noticed that my PC is taking forever to boot up and that everything within it takes a long long time to do (i.e open an excel spreadsheet or saving can take ages).

I think I must have loads of unnecessary files/cookies on the PC but how do I get rid of them? How do I clean up rubbish that has built up from downloads on email? Or could it be something else that's slowing it down so badly.

HELP!! It's making life very hard.

Go to

Start menu>Accessories>System Tools>Disk Clean-up

This should get rid off any old files etc

And look in My Computer to see how much space remaining on your drive in case it's nearly full.

Do you have XP?

Yes, I'm XP How do I do that onager?

Thanks Katy Mac will do this right now.

Umm you can right click on C: drive when you have My Computer open (I think)

Yeah, right click the C: drive and select 'properties'

The trouble is it could be many things. It could be that you have a lot of things you have installed all running at once. Do you have a lot of icons in the system tray? (bottom right corner) You may have to click the little white arrow (

I think I do have too much installed TBH I will have a look. Also try right clicking C drive.

I had this for ages, and never got rid of it until I moved to a different country and had to get new antivirus software. I used Norton until now as it was offered by my internet provider. I changed to AVG and the difference is incredible. It was not immediate, after a couple of days it got faster. It used to take almost an hour for my computer to boot up and now takes under 5 mins.

An hour to boot, that's incredible. Linux typically boots in less than a minute and boot time can be reduced to 5 seconds.

Click on My Computer.
Right click on HDD (or whatever your hard drive is called).
Click on properties (bottom of the list).

This will show a pie chart of your C drive and what is used and unused. Should have some unused, if not try uninstalling some stuff you don't use.

Click on disc clean up.
That will show you what you can delete, click delete once its done its thing.

Right then you can defrag.
Still in the HDD properties box click on the tools tab and click defragment now, this reorgainises your files and tidies it up a bit.

Did the whole right click on C drive thing and discovered I had a sliver of space left. Am currently cleaning up disk then will defragment and see what that does to the speed. Am a bit worried though about deleting something I may need later

If you look at

Control Panel>add or remove programs

It will show you which programs you use regularly & you can remove stuff you downloaded once & never used again

Yes be careful about semi-random deleting as it can be dangerous. Uninstalling as KatyMac said is safer because you can generally reinstall the things if you decide you want them later.

Can you add a drive? Some people use an external one and plug it into the USB to avoid opening the case, though it's actually relatively easy to install one.

Other alternatives include getting a shop to copy it all to a new large drive (you need one of those little shops with a nice little old guy running it, not PC World)