If you think about it, there are just as many ways to speed up your computer as there are to slow it down. In this post, I’ll provide some tips on paring down your system to help improve your computer’s performance.

Running Unnecessary Services Slows Your Computer Down

Most people stick with the configuration their computer had when they first received it. Few people take the time to go through a computer and turn off the services they don’t need. In fact, most people don’t know what services they do and don’t need.

The result is that many services get run that users never use. Each service requires a little bit of memory, so these unused services can add up to slower computer performance. If you’re looking for a little extra performance boost, or you just want to pare down the list of things your computer must do when it boots, take a look at the services your system is running.

I never advocate shutting down services you don’t recognize. There are many services your computer needs to function properly, so simply pulling the plug on services you don’t know about is bound to lead to trouble. Instead, take a look at the list of services your computer is running. Write them down or print them off if you have to, and do a little research on what each service does.

You may find that you can safely disable services that are designed to support remote computing if you (or someone else) never access your computer from a distance. Other services, like indexing, for example fall into the “toss-up” category. Indexing is a way for your computer to keep track of what files are present, what they contain and where they are. It helps the computer to produce a file you’re searching for quickly, especially if you’re searching by what the file contains rather than by what the file is called. On the other hand, indexing takes a lot of time. So much time, in fact, that many people get tired of waiting for the computer to finish indexing. Indexing can be run as a “background” task, but that will produce a noticeably slower response when indexing is occurring.

If you don’t search for your files by content, or you use file names or other basic data (like file type, creation date, etc.) to locate your files, you may want to turn off the indexing service. You can find out what services are running by going to Programs/System Tools/Services. As I said, don’t just start eliminating the services you don’t recognize, but instead use this as a starting point for research to determine what (if anything) you can do without.

Photo Credit: Paul Keller, via Flickr