Can't you turn the Symantec crap off?
This. Symantec is utter shite.
If upgrading is out of the question, there are a few things you can do:
- defrag your hard drive (sorry - do this AFTER you get rid of unwanted software and installed the software you want, preferably once after uninstalling, and again after installing. Download JKDefrag - it's free, and beats Windows' defrag by a country mile.)
- do NOT load up any software during startup (the tradeoff is your computer will take longer to load the application for the first time; once it's running the performance will be equal to having it load during startup)
- If your computer supports it, do NOT shutdown your computer; send it to standby or hibernate mode
- Uninstall everything you do not use
- Use a registry cleaner to get rid of unwanted / unnecessary / remnant registry keys from the uninstall
- Visit this website to get the software you need (they do not require install, so will keep your registry light, which will keep your OS snappier):
www.portableapps.com- Check and make sure your swapfile is of a reasonable size (or if it's on at all)
If you want a really exhaustive laundry list of ways to optimize your PC and are running XP, go through this manual:
http://www.tweakguides.com/files/TGTC_XP_4.0.zipYou can also net a significant gain in performance if you up your RAM, which is really cheap nowadays. That, and / or a new CPU (it'd probably have to be second-hand though, but then again, for the kind of mainboard you must be running, they are cheap as chips).
