Yesterday evening I received a ‘desperate call of help’ from my mate Chris. Chris’ PC computer is trying to run Microsoft Windows XP, and has been getting slower and slower and slower by the day.

So I headed round to the house of Chris to see if I could find the problem(s).

Starting the machine takes 15 minutes, closing it down takes another 15 minutes. When running Internet Explorer the machine would announce that it needs a restart due to an unexpected error in the operating system.

The machine runs a 20 gig drive, of which 4 gig is used. The machine is 2 years old and the speed is 1.47 ghz.

After about an hour and a half, and countless calls back to my brother at home (he uses a PC too) we found the problems and managed to speed up the computer. It was incredibly frustrating awaiting the machines response to commands, clicks and window moves.

Basically, after an age we identified that almost all the applications installed on the machine were attempting to start as soon as the computer is turned on, some applications were attempting to start twice. The machine was connecting to the Internet on startup and doing all kinds of other weird stuff.

The confusion began when the applications which were launching on startup were then hiding in the background, and refusing to respond. This meant that when Chris (or fiance Tracey) started an application, it could be running two or three times. I don’t understand this, how one application could start two or three instances of that application. Why would it want to do that? I can’t do that on OSX.

Pressing a key on the keyboard would awake a reaction from the machine about 20 seconds later, moving a window, or scrolling would cause all sorts of visual problems, jolting, spinning hourglasses and long long periods of nothing happening.

The most amazing thing I found was the incredible amount of time the machine wanted to be restarted, popping up a box saying that an essential restart was required. We turned it off and on about 10 times, and each time it got a bit slower on startup…..but at least it was not taking half hour to go off and come back on again.

So in Windows, go to ‘Start’ then ‘Run’ type in ‘msconfig.exe’ hit ‘return’ and watch the panel popup called ‘MSCONFIG’. Now click ‘Startup’ and just see how many applications are launching on your startup. I was amazed. I turned them all off, which upset the computer, which turned some of them back on by the next time I checked!

Overall the most amazing element of the entire process was ‘Un-install’. I cant believe how much time it takes to un-install a program (in Mac land we call it an ‘application’) from the machine. When deleting an application on a Mac you simply put the unwanted folder in the bin. Job done. On a PC, oh my word, each program seems to have a whole procedure.

I’ve had a look at the Microsoft Crash Gallery this morning and found a screengrab experienced last night:

It was an interesting couple of hours last night, but I’m sticking with my Mac.