Speed Up Computer

Sometimes, computers slow down gradually over a long period of time. The decline in performance may be so gradual that you simply don’t notice that it’s happening. In other cases, your computer comes to a screeching halt – stopped dead in its tracks by ominous warnings or the famed “blue screen of death.”

Admitting You Have A “Slow” Problem

What should you do when you can no longer deny that your computer is having a problem? If you’re not a PC technician, or at least good friends with one, and you don’t have a lot of cash to spare, join the club! There are a few things you can do to troubleshoot the immediate problem, and even attempt to cure it before things go from bad to worse for your trusted binary-loving friend.

If you’re dealing with a slow computer that’s still operational and able to boot relatively normally, your computer is in a condition you can work with. Check your computer to see what’s running on it. If you’re the kind of person who loads everything into memory when you start the computer, your poor performance may be related to the fact that your computer may not have enough memory to load the operating system properly.

Use the Task Manager to see what’s running on your computer. Better still, restart the computer and without manually opening any applications, open the Task Manager to see what’s loaded. If you find that you have many applications and utilities loading at startup, you’ll want to pare these back to see if you can get a performance upgrade.

Speaking of performance, Windows comes with a built-in performance monitor. You can see graphically what your computer is doing and get other real-time performance statistics on your setup. Performance Monitor (perfmon) is part of the system tools in Windows Vista. Simply fire it up and Performance Monitor will begin tracking your computer. You should see CPU activity rise and fall with everything you do on the computer. You may discover that one particular application is misbehaving, or is at least hogging computer resources. Uninstalling and reinstalling a fresh copy of the cranky app may solve your problem.

Apart from what the Performance Monitor can tell you, the computer registry may require a bit of maintenance. If you aren’t a computer professional, mucking around in the registry probably isn’t recommended, but you can use a registry cleaner like RegCure to remove abandoned and unneeded bits of code that are clogging up your registry and degrading your computer performance. RegCure is one of the most trusted names in registry cleaners and has been installed millions of times worldwide.

Photo Credit: Jim Champion, via Flickr