Ok, so your computer has been running at less than optimal performance for the past few months and you have no idea where to start. You could pay a technician upwards of $200 to come take a look, fiddle with a few things, and not really make any difference OR you could read my article which is free, will take 20 minutes of your time, and have drastically increase the performance of your system. So here goes...
The first thing
When your computer starts there are programs that automatically start. Some of these are necessary for Windows to run, but a lot are not. Most of these programs lurk in the background eating away at your system resources and noticeably slowing your computer down. Lucky for you you can have full control over what starts up when your computer starts. First off, to take a look at the programs that start when your computer boots follow the steps below:
1. Open your Start menu and click on Run.
2. Type in msconfig and click Open
The Microsoft System Configuration utlity opens. Most of the options in here we will have absoltuely no use for at this time. On the main page, in about the middle you'll see an option for Selective Startup, click on it and then click the Startup tab.
In this window we will see a full listing of all programs that start when the computer boots. Like I said before most of these are unnecessary so we can remove a lot of them.
We have to look each item up individually to see if it is necessary for the computer to run. Once we decide it is uneccessary we can simply uncheck it. To help us determine if it is necessary or not there is an online list here to tell us what the program is and whether or not we need it. If you don't need it, just uncheck it. Go through the whole list removing items until you finish. Click the Apply button and then click OK.
Once we have that done it will prompt you as to whether or not you want to restart. Restart your computer and you will notice a huge difference even in the loading time.
Seconds
The second thing you probably want to if you are experiencing a slow computer is to free up some hard drive space. Windows sets aside a portion of your harddrive to be used a RAM and depending on how quickly it can access this can affect the speed of your computer. To free up some harddrive space we are going to use two fairly simple tools.
The first is Add Or Remove Programs. This is a centralized location where Windows lets you remove applications from your system. To access Add or Remove Programs click Start , Control Panel, Add or Remove Programs.
Take a look through the list, select any programs you do not recognize or need, highlight them and click the Change/Remove button on the right-hand side. After you click Change/Remove, it will prompt you to remove the application, follow the wizard through the steps of removing it.
Disk Cleanup is another neat little tool to help you free up some harddrive space. It will take a look at your system and let you know how much space Windows has calculated it can get rid of. Typically, it will delete your Recycle Bin, Temporary Files, log files, and a few other areas not deemed as particularly important.
To open and use Disk Cleanup follow the steps listed below:
1. Click Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Cleanup
2. It will calculate how much space it is able to free up when it opens. It will then open a window showing where these files will be deleted from. Select All of the checkboxes in this window and click OK.
3. Now it will go through and delete all of the unnecessary data from your harddrive.
Third
Now that we've managed to free up some space on your hard drive we are now going to use to Disk Defragmenter to clean it up a bit. Defragmenting your hard drive puts the data in a more sequential order on the disk so it is quicker and easier to access it. The tool is also fairly simple to run. Follow the steps below to defragment your harddrive:
1. Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Defragmenter
2. When it opens, press the Defragment button and off you go!
Defragmenting your hard drive can take upwards of 5 hours so it is usually best to run it before bed or at a time when is using the computer for a few hours. This is part one of this article. Part two will be up this evening and cover cleaning your registry, removing spyware, and optimizing internet surfing. Thanks for reading and stay tuned!
Author Info:
Sean Carroll Tech Goldmine Blog Your #1 Source for Technology news and tips! http://www.techgoldmine.com/
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