If you are finding your PC struggle carrying out everyday tasks such as browsing the Internet or opening a few office applications at once you might want to know how to make it faster! A slow PC can be caused by outdated components or by too many programs installed or running in the background on the machine. This can be taken care of in the following ways.
How To Speed Up Your PC
There are many ways to go about speeding up your PC including the following:
Removing un-used programs
Stopping programs which arean’t required running as background processes
Adding more system memory
Disk Defragmentation
Removing spyware/malware
Removing viruses
Removing un-used programs
To remove un-used programs, go to the task manager, and switch it to classic view, double click on add/remove programs and you will see a long list of programs installed on your PC. Simply go through the list and uninstall each one you no longer use or no longer require on the PC.
Stopping processes
Check how many processes you have running by opening the task manager, by pressing Control Alt & Delete and click on the processes tab at the top, you will see a list of running processes. If this number is over 40 on XP or more than 80 on Vista you need to reduce the amount of processes running in the background, many of these start up with Windows so they need to be stopped.
Stopping start-up programs
To stop processes from starting up with Windows go to start, run, type ‘msconfig’ and press enter, click on start up and uncheck each program that you do not require to start with Windows, making sure you don’t uncheck any that are required.
Disk Defrag
Disk Defrag is essential as other wise data can become fragmented and will become slower to access. Once system files (files required by the Operating System to function) become fragmented the whole PC will run a heck of a lot slower than it should. That is why it is a good idea to run defrag every week or so. To run disk defrag go to Start, program files, accessories and system tools and double click on Disk Defragmenter.
Installing more system memory
Adding more system memory is a good idea these days as RAM is so cheap to buy. I bought 4GB of DDR2 RAM recently for £38. Consider upgrading your RAM if you are running XP with less than 512MB or Vista with less than 1GB. RAM is much faster than the hard drive and is how data is transferred from different applications when you are using the PC so it is important that you have a good amount of RAM. I run Vista Ultimate 64bit and have 6GB and it runs really well. I had 2GB before and it was much slower.
Scan for Viruses
Run your anti-virus program every week to check for viruses, perhaps stick it on an schedule to scan every week at a certain time encase you forget. Viruses can cause a PC to slow down to a crawl and can cause much annoyance. Also, run a spyware checker such as Spybot or Adaware every week to check the system and remove any infections that it may have.
