Slowing Windows Rot

Most people notice that computers running Windows (XP or otherwise) start to slow down after time; this phenomenon is known as "Windows rot." There are some things that can be done to help speed things up such as defragmenting drives and cleaning the registry, but I've never seen much improvement from them. Reinstalling Windows from scratch helps, but if like me you've taken a lot of time to install and customize programs, it's not something you relish especially when it means days of re-downloading patches and updates.

This weekend I came across the following XP tip that worked great. It's fairly safe, but PLEASE DO NOT TRY THIS IF YOU ARE NOT SURE OF WHAT YOU ARE DOING:

If you've installed and uninstalled a few different bits of hardware (even including just moving a device from one USB port to another), there could be redundant entries in your device manager.

To clean these up, do the following:

-Set a System Restore point

-Click Start>Run and type CMD

-In the command window, type set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 (NB, there must be no spaces either side of the = sign, or it just won't work)

-Type start devmgmt.msc

-The Device Manager window will appear. Click View>Show Hidden Devices

-Expand each device category in turn - unused entries will have faint icons next to them and can generally* be uninstalled by right-clicking them and picking 'Uninstall'

*Exceptions that you probably don't want to uninstall, even if they have a faint icon:

-Items in the category Network Devices, unless they are obvious duplicates

-Any devices that you know are still valid, but just aren't connected right now - your USB memory stick, perhaps, or maybe a webcam or something.

Even if you accidentally uninstall something you shouldn't, it generally means Windows will just reinstall it next time you restart and if the worst comes to the worst (it won't), you have the fallback position of the System Restore point.

What happens is that every time you plug in something like a flash drive, Windows has to make an entry in the device manager. If you stick the same device in a different USB port, another entry is generated. Do this with a few devices and you can have tons of unneeded devices that the system is trying to monitor, slowing things down. For me, I had probably close to a dozen entries for my USB devices, and even my monitor, network card, fixed drives and CD drives had duplicate entries. I cleaned them out and noticed a big improvement in performance.

A couple pointers:

1. This has to be done as outlined above. Do not close the command window before going into device manager or it will not work.
2. All steps have to be performed each time you do this. In other words, in the instructions quoted above, the second step does not set that variable permanently.
3. If you unload the entries for your USB devices, they will be reloaded next time you plug them in, assuming they are plug and play. The lesson learned here is use the same USB port for the same device every time to minimize cloning of device entries.

Again, this did far more for my old system than most of the more popular tweaks floating around on the internet, some of which don't work and some of which are not safe. I hope this helps someone; happy computing.