How to Speed Up a Slow Computer

Remember how fast your computer was when you first bought it? But now it’s a different story – now you’ve got a slow computer.  You need to wait for your files to open, your computer has slow startup and applications take ages to launch. Luckily, it’s not too hard to make your computer faster – all you need to do is give it a bit of loving care with the right tools.

The first thing you need to do when your computer becomes slow is to run a computer cleaner. As time goes by, your computer accumulates junk files (various temporary files, cookies, browser history, etc.) and registry errors. Junk files take up valuable disk space and registry errors affect PC stability, making your computer freeze and crash. Running disk cleanup and then scanning your PC with a registry cleaner will delete all the junk that has accumulated over time, free up space and speed up computer performance.

When your computer is free of junk files and registry errors, it’s time to make your Windows boot faster. By default, a lot of software is configured to run on system boot. This can be handy for some applications, but having too many startup items decreases system performance. The solution is to use msconfig or a third-party startup manager to review programs launching on  Windows boot and disable the ones you feel comfortable about launching manually. Generally speaking, it’s good to disable software like Skype, IM programs, and various Adobe helpers.

The next step is to get rid of disk fragmentation. Fragmentation is something that occurs in Windows because of the way Windows file system works. When you create new files, download files, or modify existing files, Windows tries to save them in an efficient way and utilize every single bit of free space. To do that, Windows splits larger files and fills every available fragment of free space. As a result, the files become fragmented and your hard drive needs longer to open it. So if you notice that your files take longer to open and your software takes a long time to launch, it’s disk fragmentation that is responsible for that.

And last but not least, make sure all your drivers are up to date. Having outdated device drivers can lead to various hardware conflicts, which usually make your computer slow. You can view the installed drivers in the Device Manager and download the updates manually, or you can update drivers automatically with the help of driver update software.

Keep your computer well-maintained, and it will run as fast as new.