Tuesday, June 5, 2007

What software slows your system the most?


LOOK AT THIS IMAGE and Just be careful over what you install. If you need a font for something, you only need to open it in the Windows font browser and it should become available in your application until you close the font browser. Installing and forgetting about fonts is a very easy way to slowly degenerate your boot times. If you can avoid them, don't install an antivirus program (especially not Norton). That's not perfect advice for everyone, but if you've got an oodle of web-smarts, you should be able to spot what's bad and what's ok.

One thing not covered by this test (for sheer time purposes)is what happens when you uninstall the software. It's well known that applications junk the registry with crap long after they've gone so be aware that the only way to get some of that performance back from a bad application may be to do a clean install of Windows.

Another was drivers. Drivers are known to increase the boot time (as VMWare displays) but are completely impossible to demonstrate on a testing system like this. If I did the tests again with a whole PC and different hardware, this would be more a test of hardware than software. If you want to know how drivers perform, read the hardware reviews.

~~The End~~