In my last post, I gave a few “back to school” tips to speed up your slow computer. There are many more things you can do besides those basic tasks to get a little speed boost from your computer. Today, I’ll continue that theme and examine some other things that will help your computer remain in top form, no matter how old it is.

The Need For (Computer) Speed Is Universal

There’s nothing fun about dealing with a slow computer, especially when you have assignments due, or have a limited amount of time in which to get things done. If you’ve corrected all of the basic problems and cleared up any viral or malware infections that may be stealing processor time, there are a few other steps you can take to get more out of your computer for less money than you’d spend on upgrading.

Number one on the list is defragmenting your hard drive. This is probably a technique that should be considered “basic” but if you haven’t “defragged” your disk in awhile, you could be building up quite a performance delay. Defragmenting is done with a defragmenting utility, one of which comes free with the Windows OS. Defragmenter is in the System Tools collection, and will show you how fragmented your hard disk is and will put your files back in a neat order. Plan on defragmenting your disk once or twice each year, more often if you copy and delete a lot of files to and from your disk regularly.

Number two on the list is install more RAM or graphics/video memory. Your computer has a limit as to how much RAM it can address, so don’t add more than your computer can handle. Your owners manual should tell you how much RAM your computer can recognize. You can also find this information out from the BIOS information that’s displayed at bootup. If your computer has a separate graphics processor/card you may be able to get a performance boost by adding more graphics memory, making more memory available to graphics processing or by putting a new graphics card into your computer. This may be especially helpful if you use your computer predominantly for gaming.

Number three is a “don’t-do.” If you’re working with an older computer, consider NOT upgrading your system to the latest OS. The older your computer is, the less likely it is to meet the minimum requirements for newer OSs. Even though the system may load and operate, most of the computer’s processing resources will be devoted to running the OS, and not meeting the needs of the user. Just something to keep in mind when you’re looking for better performance.

Photo Credit: Technicool, via Flickr