Every computer owner has experienced this problem. When you first buy a shiny new computer, it seems to run at blazingly fast speeds. As the years go by, however, its performance seems to degrade until your computer runs very slow.
But short of buying a new computer, what can you do? Sure, those computer-guru techies may know how to speed up a slow computer, but you lack the knowledge and skills to do advanced stuff like that. Luckily, there are many very simple, very easy things you can do to speed up your computer. This article will explain to you how to do them.
There is no single magic bullet that will return your computer to blinding speeds. Rather, there are several small things you can do that will each speed up your computer a little bit. Put all together, these things will speed up your computer significantly. The options below are listed not by how much they will speed up your computer, but rather by how easy they are for you to perform.
1. Clean Up Your Computer
During the course of regular operation, your computer creates many temporary files. If your hard drive is full, your computer has to search for enough free space to put these temporary files, slowing it down. By deleting junk files and freeing up space on your hard drive, you may increase your computer’s performance.
First, run the built-in hard disk cleaning tool in Windows. Go to Start, Accessories, System Tolls, and click on Disk Cleanup. It may run for a long time. When it finishes, check all the boxes and click OK.
Another way to free up space is to uninstall any software programs that you don’t use. To do this, go to Start, Settings, Control Panel, and click on Add/Remove Programs. Click on the program you want to uninstall and click the “Remove” button.
2. Defragment Your Hard Drive
Your computer stores files wherever it can find free space on your hard drive. If it can’t find a free space big enough to hold the entire file, it breaks the file up into smaller fragments and stores them in different places on the hard drive. The problem with this is that when you want to access a file, it takes your computer longer because it has to hunt down all the fragments and put them back together before opening the file.
Defragmenting your hard drive will put all the fragments together into continuous files, making them easier and quicker for your computer to find and open. To do this, go to Start, Accessories, System Tolls, and click on Disk Defragmenter. Select the hard drive you want and click the “Defragment” button
3. Find and Remove any Viruses, Adware, Spyware, and Malware
Viruses, Adware, Spyware, and Malware are programs that run silently in the background, hogging your computer’s resources like memory and processing power and bogging it down. Malicious programs, like Viruses and Malware, may be damage your computer’s safe, smooth, and fast operation. To remove these unwanted visitors from your computer, you’ll need software specifically designed to hunt down and delete them.
In general, protective software you buy or subscribe to is more thorough and efficient than free software. If you’re on a budget, however, there are some free programs available for download. For example:
For viruses: AVG Antivirus Free Edition 8.5
For adware: Ad-Aware 8.0 (Anniversary Edition)
For spyware: Spybot Search & Destroy 1.62
For malware: Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware 1.36
After downloading and installing these programs, make sure you use the “Update” option before scanning to get the best results.
4. Clean Your Computer’s Registry
Your computer’s registry contains all the information on every user, program, and piece of hardware, and tells your computer how to use them. Over time, however, the registry data can become corrupted, making your computer take longer to perform a task. It can also become bloated with obsolete entries that just take up space, forcing your computer to take longer finding the information it’s looking for in the registry.
To clean and repair your computer’s registry, you’ll need to download and install a special program designed for the job. Again, registry cleaning software you have to pay for or subscribe to tends to be more efficient and thorough. If you can’t afford that though, there are still some free registry cleaning programs available, such as Wise Disk Cleaner, Glary’s Registry Repair, or TweakNow’s RegCleaner.
If your computer runs very slow, cleaning and repairing the registry is one of the most effective ways to speed it up. Just be sure to run the registry cleaning program regularly (every month or so), to keep your computer from slowing down again.
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