Posts Tagged ‘slow computer’

My Computer Runs Very Slow – How Can You Speed It Up?

Friday, June 19th, 2009

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.

Tags: slow computer
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Why Is My Computer So Slow?

Sunday, April 26th, 2009

You may find yourself asking yourself, “Why is my computer so slow?”  The fact of the matter is that there are many possible answers to this question. There are simply a lot of things that can potentially slow down your computer. Some of these things are fairly simple to take care of. But, there are others that can be a lot more difficult and some of them are even potentially harmful to your computer.

Part of knowing how to solve this problem of a slow computer is knowing  when your computer starting running more slowly. Is it a new (less than one year old) computer that you have? Did this slowness begin suddenly, or do recall that it seems to have been building up over time and then it finally got to a point where you are now noticing it quite a lot? Did you just put a new, very large program on your hard drive that may be taking up a great deal of RAM memory?  Have you been a download junkie who can’t resist installing a new program on a constant basis?

If you take a careful look, you’ll find that there’s really nothing mystical in the answer to the question, “Why is my computer so slow?” But, the answer to the question might just take you by surprise.

Well, always begin an investigation into this matter by doing a disk cleanup. Assuming you have a Windows OS, you’ll find this at Start/Accessories/System Tools/Disk Clean Up. This program scans your computer for superfluous files that you probably don’t need any longer. These are mostly Java Applets and the temporary folders that get opened up whenever you browse a new website, and things of that nature. The program will find them all, queue them up to be deleted, tell you how much space you will free up when they are trashed, and then ask you to make sure you want to delete them.  You may find that your computer starts running faster after this, and you should now get into the habit of doing disk cleanup once a week.

But, what if that doesn’t help much? Then it’s time to look a little deeper.

What If You Have a Hard Drive That’s Too Full?

This is one of the simplest slow poke problems to have. You might just be nearing the end of your computer’s current memory storage capacity.  This means that your computer is trying to juggle too much information at once, and just as when you have tons of information swirling around in your head about something, it’s finding it extra hard to access the correct data. This could definitely be the problem if you just downloaded a couple of very large programs such as complex video games.

You will need to go through your programs and files and start deleting some if it turns out that you have most  of your memory filled up, which you can find out about by going to Control Panel and taking a look at your Hard Drive. If your computer has more RAM capacity, like a second hard drive that you have but have not activated, consider upgrading and increasing your RAM. You can also preserve your files and programs on an external hard drive and/or a flash USB drive.

What If Your Computer Has Registry Problems?

This one can be a little more difficult. Your computer’s registry is like its DNA and its life experience memories all wrapped up together. If you are rather new to this kind of problem, don’t try to repair your own registry.  Download a program that will scan your registry for you -the download and scan are usually free, and you only pay when it deems you need to fix a registry problem. If the program says that you need to fix some registry keys, enable it to do that for you. Advanced users might try to do this themselves because they want to make sure nothing they want to keep gets “fixed”.

What If Your Computer Is Running Too Many Programs At Once?

Well, you might have programs running simultaneously that are over-taxing your computer’s memory or interfering with each other. A lot of times, this is because you have a ton of programs set up to automatically boot up when you start your computer or bring it back out of hibernation.  Some registry key fixer programs will also act as a program manager for you and reconfigure your boot-up so that this doesn’t happen. If you don’t use one of them, take a look at your systems tray (the space on the right on the bar down at the bottom of your computer’s screen, where the clock and Internet connection status are found). If you have a ton of icons in there, this could be your problem; so right-click some of them and disable them from automatic start-up.

Are You the Victim of Spyware or Malware?

Well, if all else fails to solve your slowness problem, and you are very certain you have not just downloaded huge programs, and you find that your computer’s slowness came on quite suddenly, the bad news is you have got spyware or other malware on your computer.  If you don’t know how it could have gotten there-that’s the whole point (from the perspective of the people who sent it to you). It probably came from an innocent-seeming e-mail or was on a website that you visited. Download or install and run a spyware scanner to find the problem and get it fixed before your computer is harmed or you become the victim of identity theft.  Since prevention is better than cure, from now on have a spyware scanner program installed that does a regular scan (every 24 hours or every 12). These programs are usually free to install and have scan for you, and you would pay to have any spyware or other malware removed.

So, if you find yourself asking the mirror, “Why is my computer so slow?”, you now have some solutions.

Tags: slow computer, speed up pc
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