If you’re among the untold legions of students getting ready to go back to school, you’ll want to spend a few minutes making sure your computer is ready for the coming semester. The last thing you want to deal with is a slow computer during orientation week or worse, exam week.

Common Causes of Slow Computer

Before you pack up your beloved computer, scan it for viruses and malware. Clean up whatever you find, and that includes cleaning out the registry. Use a registry cleaner like RegCure for best results. Make sure you have the latest virus and malware definitions. If you don’t, download them or update your subscription to the A/V software. You may also want to check with your college or university. Sometimes, they’ve licensed A/V software for every campus computer, including personal computers that belong to students. Using the license that comes with being a student may save you a few bucks in the process.

Before you do anything else, back up your data. Seriously. Whether you run the built-in backup and restore, or copy your files to a thumb drive, or back your files off to a CD, back up your data. Don’t forget to back up your system data, too. Put your backup media – whatever you’ve chosen – aside for the moment. We’ll come back to it.

Run the disk utilities on your PC to search the hard disk for errors, corrupted files and other disasters. Fix or get rid of those. When your system is completely clean and free from errors, back it up again. Pack your backup media and take it with you. You may need it later in the year.

Pare down the number of applications you run at startup. Be especially wary of those apps that “volunteer” to load automatically during the app installation process. There are very few applications you need all the time; virus checkers and malware programs come to mind as good candidates for autoloading. Office applications and game programs should be loaded only when you’re using them.

One last note: most college campuses have open labs or public computing labs, and you may find yourself using these or transferring files back and forth via thumb drive, or via the network. Public workstations are a mixed bag. Colleges and universities usually have a specific upgrade schedule for their classroom and computing lab equipment. You may find yourself working on three-year-old equipment, or you may find yourself working on the latest hardware with a full complement of RAM. Comparatively, the computer you bring from home may seem speedy or downright pokey. Always evaluate software upgrades carefully and make sure your computer has the hardware it needs to run the upgraded software. If the upgrade is a must, you’ll need to upgrade your computer, too.

Photo Credit: quinn.anya, via Flickr