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 computers. Many people prefer to use new computers because of their speed and ease of working. You willingly spend more time working on the newer, faster computer as compared to working on the older ones. So your perception is that your older computer is getting slower and slower. But in reality it can become as fast as a new computer by just implementing a few of the following things.

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 utilities found in your programs. This is the first good step that saves system boot up and applications loading times.

Run a full anti-virus and anti-spyware scan

The 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. Some good antivirus softwares are 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 from these kinds of threats if you enable a good antivirus solution.

Delete old network connections

Your computer may try to connect to old network/shared connections and hard drives connections that no longer exist. You can simply right click on any network share and delete them if you no longer use them. 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 your 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 any Windows system components.

Clean up the registry

Registry cleaning is a not a simple task because the changes are not reversible so only experts should work in the Windows Registry. While some expert says that a registry cleaning doesn’t really work or help, I have seen good results from registry cleaning. CCleaner is among the recommended software 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.

Reinstall Windows

If the above mentioned steps haven’t helped then it may be the time to reformat your hardware disk, reinstalling your applications and reinstalling your Windows. You may be surprised by seeing how much more responsive your Windows will becoming as you wipe 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 the recovery disk. Or another option is to take an image of your hard disk with Norton ghost. Norton ghost can recover the Windows in it original working stage when it was newly installed in just minutes. Be assured to back up everything before your start your work.

Upgrade RAM

This is one of the most important steps to run a faster computer. Adding RAM is very simple and even a novice can add it to increase their speed in few minutes. Adding a high quality RAM will give you a great performance boost.

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 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 the speed/performance of your computer will definitely help you

Fiza Ali, IT Consultant

Aryan writes: The information given in this article is very useful, as a PC user if one is aware about these basic facts, one would not face the downtime effected by malicious viruses and other harmwares

1:08:26 Tue Aug 11 2009 CDT


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