Making your Windows computer run faster
As time passes it seems like your computer gets slower and slower, well it’s not an illusion or you getting used to the speed. It’s just a reality that your computer is slowing down. The reason is simple, the load put on it is much larger then the first time you took it out of the box.
There are some steps you can take to keep your PC running smoothly, below is a quick list of areas you should check and focus on.
If you only pick one thing to do when maintaining your PC, then pick this one. Always defragment your hard disk on a regular basis. What is a regular basis? There are lots of discussions and thoughts around this, I typically would say every 3 or 4 weeks.
Remove any programs you no longer need. Some of them may even be running when you don’t think they are. Check which programs run at startup, you can do this by running msconfig from the Start|run taskbar. Go to the startup tab and you will see a list of all programs that run on startup. Take a close looks at anything you have installed and do need to run automatically anymore. You can always start them manually if you need them later.
If you are feeling brave and have your PC backed up then take a look at cleaning out your registry. All those programs you have installed just add to the entries in the registry, sometime after uninstall they still leave entries. The bigger the registry, the longer Windows will take to read it and bootup, so skinny it down.
If you are used to dealing with the registry you could probably clean up by hand, but you can do a lot of harm in there, so I would recommend buying a product that does it for you. There are plenty out there from big reputable companies that you can purchase.
Make sure you protection software is up-to-date, especially in the area of spyware. Having spyware running on your PC is unpredictable and you have no measurement of what it is doing to affect the speed and performance of your Windows system.
