PC & Laptop Guide : 8 Ways to Speed Up Your PC

Disk Cleanup Utility

You may not realize it, but just because you finish with a file doesn't mean your computer does. In many cases, if your computer's hard drive were a garage, you would have unused junk files piled 20 feet high and spilling out into the street. Everyone should use the Windows "Disk Cleanup Utility" to delete old, unused, and temporary files that clog your hard drive. Click Start, point at All Programs (or Programs), Accessories, System Tools, and click Disk Cleanup.Analyze your hard drive for files you can eliminate and it may shock you to see how much hard drive space (and speed) you can free up with a few clicks.

Defrag

Imagine a properly maintained hard drive as room the size of “supermarket” filled with filing cabinets. Now imagine ripping open every drawer of every filingcabinet, slinging the contents onto the floor and trying to find one document -that's a fragmented hard drive. Sometimes lack of speed simply results from your computerworking too hard to find the files it needs. You can solve this problem by "defragging" your harddrive. Click Start, point to All Programs (or Programs), Accessories, System Tools, and click Disk Defragmentor.Choose the disk you want to defragment and expect to let the program run for several hours.

Uninstall Unused Software

We all maintain software on our systems we rarely, if ever, use. That software can steal system resources. Click Start, Control Panel, and "Add Remove Programs" to pull up a screen that allows you to remove old programs you don't use anymore. Simply select and uninstall all programs you know for sure you don't need or want.

Stop Them At Startup

This operation requires a bit more technical savvy than the other four, so proceed with caution. Many programs load into the system tray in the lower right of your computer's desktop and consume system resources even if you never use them.Click Start, Run, type in msconfig, and press Enter. Click the "Startup" tab to see a list of programs thatautomatically start with Windows. Clear the check box next to programs you know you don'twant to load at startup. But don't clear any checkbox unless you are 100% certain of a program's purpose. Once you finish, click OK and it will prompt you to restart Windows.

Get Rid of Spyware

Spyware is software with malicious intent - by design; it does something bad to your computer. Usually, it gets installed without your knowledge. It sometimes takes advantage of the fact that most people click "I Agree" to software licenses without reading them. The only way to get rid of spyware is to have some kind of scanner, sort of like an anti-virus. In order to make a computer run faster and keep it safer your going to need an anti-spyware program. This is tricky, a lot of the spyware programs out there are malicious and will actually add viruses and spyware to your computer by using the "spyware scanner and blocker". So please remember to be very careful when choosing your anti-spyware program.

Find and Repair Disk Errors

Detect and Repair Disk Errors, in addition to running Disk Cleanup and Disk Defragmenter to optimize the performance of your computer, you can check the integrity of the files stored on your hard disk by running the Error Checking utility.
Click Start, and then click My Computer. In the My Computer window, right-click the hard disk you want to search for bad sectors, and then click Properties. In the Properties dialog box, click the Tools tab. Click the Check Now button. In the Check Disk dialog box, select the Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors check box, and then click Start. If bad sectors are found, choose to fix them. “Tip: Only select the Automatically fix file system errors check box if you think that your disk contains bad sectors.”

Buy More RAM

Increasing your RAM, a computer's memory, can dramatically increase speed when running certain operations or programs. RAM costs so little now that you should install the maximum amount of memory your system can handle.

Get An External Hard Drive

Adding an External Hard Drive to your computer will allow you to clear out a lot of the things you don't need to be storing on your normal hard drive. A great example would be your music or pictures. All those songs and pictures are sitting on your computer making it go slower. You will see a decline in your computers performance as soon as you use over half of your hard drive space. Moving all your songs or pictures to your external hard drive will free up a lot of space on your main hard drive. You can even move applications such as photoshop or games. An external hard drive is also handy because it is portable. You can unplug it from your computer and take it to a friends house and plug it in there, sharing photos and pictures very easily.