Computers and Technology

This is a very common question of everyone that my computer is very slow and what can I do to speed up my computer?

There are several things that can speed up your computer and increase the performance. You may have noticed that a newer computer is much faster than the older computer. Many people prefer to use new computers because of their speed and ease of working. You willingly spend more time working on the newer fast computer as compared to working on the older computer. So your perception is that your older computer is getting slower and slower. But in reality it can become as faster as a new computer by just implementing few following things.

Now we come to the real question: How to speed up a computer, whether it's slowing down or not. Here are the few steps if you follow them you can speed up your computer.

Clean up the disk. First of all you have to uninstall the programs that run at the startup and put something in the system tray. Run Disk Cleanup and defragment utility. This is a first good step that saves sometime of system boot up and applications loading.

Run a full anti-virus and anti-spyware scan. Next step is to run a full system scan for viruses, spywares, adwares, malware and Trojan horses with some good anti viruses and anti spyware/malware tools. The good antivirus software is Trend Micro Antivirus, Norton Antivirus, Panda Antivirus and McAfee antivirus. These antivirus software/tools can help you get rid of pc-clogging detritus on your computer, viruses, temp files, old registry entries and spywares. Your computer can be secure with all these kind of threats if you enable a good antivirus on your computer.

Delete old network connections. Your computer can try to connect to the old network/shared connections and hard drives connections that are no longer exist. You can simply right click on any network share and delete them if it no longer exists. Under tools, also click on the "Disconnect Network Drive".
Stop auto-starting programs. Next step is to click start > run and type "msconfig at the command prompt. Now from the startup remove all the unwanted programs that run at the time when system boots up. This will definitely increase the speed of your system. You can turn off anything that looks useless but be careful not to remove Windows system components.

Clean up the registry. Registry cleaning is a not a simple task because the changes are not reversible so only the expert people should work in the Windows Registry. Some expert says that registry cleaner don't really work and help. I have seen some good software for registry cleaning and system speed up. CCleaner is among one of them and you can use it for increasing the performance of your computer.
Those are the easy and free things you can do. If your computer is still slow you need to move on to the bigger guns.

o Reinstall Windows. If the above mentioned steps haven't helped then it may be the time to reformatting your hardware disk, reinstalling your applications and reinstalling your Windows. You may be surprised by seeing that how much responsive is the Windows as you have wiped out years of temp files, registry entries and old versions of the software program that have not been upgraded repeatedly. Reinstalling is easy if you have got the recovery disk. There is a one more option and that is to take the image of your hard disk with Norton ghost. Norton ghost can recover the Windows in it original working stage when it was newly installed just in minutes. An image of the hard disk drives can be taken with this software and can be recovered. But be assured to back up everything before your start your work.

o Upgrade RAM. This is one of the most important steps to run the computer faster. With the older computer you will rarely have enough RAM to run. Adding RAM is a very simple and even a novice can add it and increase the speed in few minutes. Adding a high quality RAM will give a quick speed to your computer. Today's RAM sticks have the greater capacity and speed than before.

o Upgrade your hard drive. Upgrading a hard disk is a more complicated solution but if you are upgrading/reinstalling Windows then you may consider upgrading the hard disk as well. Hard Disk storage is a performance bottleneck on every computer. The magnetic disks tend to decrease their performance over time. Some performance and speed issues are caused by the hard disks failure. You can also use the new Hard disks for backups and occasional use.

I hope that the tips I provided you to increase speed/performance of your computer, will definitely help you.