Originally posted in July, 2000
Probably the most frequent question I have coming across my screen as I sit in ExpertCity is “How do I stop getting illegal operations? What do they mean?”
An Ill-op isn’t something you’ve done wrong, and it’s certainly not illegal. No policemen are going to come to your house and take your […]
Written by Raven on October 3rd, 2006 with
comments disabled.
Read more articles on Windows.
Originally posted in July, 2000
Probably the most frequent question I have coming across my screen as I sit in ExpertCity is “How do I stop getting illegal operations? What do they mean?”
An Ill-op isn’t something you’ve done wrong, and it’s certainly not illegal. No policemen are going to come to your house and take your computer away. It simply means that your computer’s resources were too low to continue doing whatever task it was trying to do at the moment, while at the same time running all of the other tasks on its plate.
Take a look at your system tray (the box in the lower right-hand corner by your clock). Is it full of icons? Everything that is in that box is a program that is running in the background while you work on your computer. You may not be using it at the moment; might not even use it at all for a few days. But still this program thinks that it needs to be running all of the time just in case you decide you need to use it. Having that icon there saves you about 4 seconds that it would otherwise take you to activate that program from the Start menu.
What does this tremendous (cough) time saver cost you? In terms of resources, quite a bit.
Your computer only has a finite amount of resources to work with. How much exactly is determined by a number of things:
The more RAM you have, the better. Some people will tell you that anything over 96 megs is wasted, as Windows doesn’t use it. While this may be true, (I can neither confirm nor deny it) more RAM certainly has never hurt anyone, and I personally have seen a significant increase in performance when boosting my RAM over 96 megs. Perhaps Windows doesn’t use it, but other programs do!
The trend for internet connections has moved greatly to high-speed, such as cable or DSL. As a result, webmasters are becoming less worried about the amount of graphics that they use in their webpage, and the file size of those graphics, since they can be downloaded up to 100 times faster than a dial-up connection. You’ve probably seen this trend emerging at all of your favorite web sites. They’re getting prettier, and taking longer to load. Well, all of those graphics are served up to you via your video card, so the more graphics you look at, the more you’re taxing the amount of RAM on that card. If you’ve got a small video card with 4 megs or less of “video memory”, you’ve probably noticed that after surfing for a while, you’ll scroll a webpage down and it will appear to “smear” vertically. That’s a sure sign that your video memory can’t take anymore, and it’s time to reboot. If you’re a power-surfer or work a lot with graphics, buy a video card with the most memory that you can afford. 16 megs is a good minimum for true power users.
Your swap file is a folder that resides on your hard drive. As your computer’s RAM fills up, Windows will compensate by ‘dumping’ things you’re not accessing at the moment into that file so that it can use your RAM for what you are currently working on. Microsoft would have you believe that it’s best to let Windows manage your swap file (aka ‘virtual memory’), but this simply isn’t true. It’s best to set the limits of your swap file yourself, and if possible, place it off of the C: drive (or partition) or at least out of the Windows folder. MaximumPC has written a fantastic tutorial on how to do this yourself. (Check the bottom of the page on the new window that pops up.)
Some hardware in your machine will use resources. This is unavoidable and unfortunately the only way to keep them from doing that is to remove the hardware. Usually the hardware is there because you need it to be so, so you’ll have to live with the consequences. Fortunately, most of the “big” resource eaters are being remade these days to have their own processor on the card, so they’re not using up as much as they used to. Deluxe sound cards, big video cards that perform many functions (like being tv tuners), and networking cards are guilty of grabbing a few percentage points of resources.
Before you begin, make sure you’re on a fresh, hard reboot. A hard (or “cold”) reboot is when you shut your machine down completely and restart it again using the power button. Simply choosing “Restart Windows” from the shutdown menu is what’s referred to as a soft boot, since it really only reboots the operating system and programs - the software.
Check your resources and find out what they are upon bootup. Do this by right-clicking on My Computer and choosing Properties, then hitting the Performance tab. Your System Resources should be over 90%. If they’re not, you’ve got a serious problem with Windows starting too many programs when it boots up and having too much pure, unadulterated junk on the drive. The farther over 90% it is the better, although you’ll never see a full 100%. The highest I’ve seen is 98%.
(Note: The following is for Win98. In Win95 you must take different steps and it’s a bit more complicated, but anything past step #1 you can do easily. With enough requests, I’ll post a clean-up routine for Win95.)
Hit the Startup tab and uncheck everything that you do not want running when your computer boots up. The only things that are necessary to leave in are SystemTray and ScanRegistry, as Windows needs these to run. At any time you feel that you need something turned back on, you can simply come back to this msconfig/startup window and re-check that item.
Unchecking these items will take their icon out of your system tray. If you need to turn one of these programs on, simply access the program by going through your Start/Programs menu, or make a shortcut to the program on your desktop. Unchecking these items does *not* remove or uninstall the programs from your computer in any way.
When you are finished with the Startup tab, click on the AutoExec.bat and Win.ini tabs. Look for anything that says Run= or Load=. If these exist, simply type “REM” (no quotes) in front of the item. These are often loaded by games that run in DOS mode, but some other programs put these commands into the autoexec.bat and win.ini files.
You’re finished with msconfig. Click Apply, and then click Ok.
Your computer will tell you it needs to restart for the changes to take effect. Tell it ok and let it restart.
In the “Named” area, type “*.tmp” (without the quotes). Make sure the “Look In” drop-down box is set to all of the drives in your computer, and “include subfolders” is checked.
Click Find Now!
Highlight everything that turns up in the window and delete it. A fast way to do this is to click on the topmost file, and hold down the left shift key while you click on the very bottom file. They will all be highlighted and then you can just right-click and choose Delete.
Do the same thing for “*.chk” files, and delete those.
Close the Find window.
Close your browser.
Close your mail program.
Almost done!
Hit the Screen Saver tab.
Set the screen saver to None. You can turn this back on when you are completely finished, but it needs to be turned off during ScanDisk and Defrag, which are coming up.
Hit Apply and Ok.
Your task manager will appear. End task on everything that is currently running except for Systray and Explorer. You’ll need to Ctrl-Alt-Del again after ending every task.
Hit Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools.
Choose Scandisk, set it to all drives, and let it start. There are options available to you in ScanDisk, take a moment to look at them to choose your personal settings. It’s fine to just leave it on the default settings.
If you do not ScanDisk often or have never done so, this will take quite a while. Let it finish completely.
When it is done, hit Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools again, and choose Defrag.
Set it to your C: drive and start it. This will also take a long time, especially if you have a large hard drive or haven’t performed a defrag in a while. It might be best to do this just before going to bed and just let the computer run while you sleep.
Take heart, though! The more frequently you S&D, the faster they will be.
When you’re all finished, you’ll have a nice clean, smooth-running computer that will be much nicer to you on resources! Keep in mind though, that you should do this cleanup once a week or so in order to keep your computer in tip-top shape. Some of these steps should be done at least every other day, such as emptying your cache, recycle bin, and deleted mail.
Here’s some things to keep in mind:
Remember, your computer is like a car. It needs its oil changed and the tires rotated every now and again to keep running well. The cleaner your hard drive, the better your machine will run!
Written by Raven on October 3rd, 2006 with
comments disabled.
Read more articles on Windows.
Comments on this article have been disabled.
Just click this button!