Everyone is looking to extend the life of computers and computer equipment these days, but one of the “costs” of doing so is that older equipment tends to be slower equipment, when compared to newer, more modern devices. There are many conditions that can slow a computer down, and a number of tried-and-true fixes to help recapture some lost computer performance.

Before You Try Other Things To Speed Up Your Computer, Try These

Reboot. It sounds almost trite, but this trick may work wonders, especially if you tend to leave your computer running for long periods of time between restarts. Software programs (and even operating systems) can cause what are known as “memory leaks.” A memory leak is a condition where a slowly but steadily growing amount of memory is devoted to a process or application incorrectly. Evenutually, the memory leak will consume all available RAM, leaving nothing for required processes. This can lead to excessive paging – the swapping of information into and out of RAM – and slow performance. A reboot will reset all RAM in the computer and eliminate the corrupted process.

A/V Scans Computers are especially vulnerable to viruses and malware that gets loaded onto the computer. These programs are notorious for consuming memory and generally wreaking havoc on the operating state of your computer. Malware can be eliminated by uninstalling, (not always though), but viruses require the special assistance of an anti-virus program (and sometimes a well-trained technician). Viruses can leave a nasty mess behind even when they’ve been disabled or removed.

Defragment Defragmenting your hard drive is a “regular maintenance” item and should be conducted monthly if you do a lot of downloading or file creation, and at the least, once per quarter if you don’t use your computer that heavily. Keeping your disk organized in this way will cut down on the time required by the computer to read and write files and may also improve the performance of virtual memory caches.

Registry cleaners Do they work? Yes. In a perfect world, the uninstall routines would work flawlessly to remove (rather than just disable) unneeded registry entries. Our world, however, is far from perfect, so a lot of unneeded information remains in the registry. The computer has no way of knowing that the information is no longer valid, so it can waste time reading (and waiting for phantom device responses) information that doesn’t amount to anything important. There are several registry cleaners available. I always recommend RegCure. I’ve found it to be an exceptional tool that works well, especially for PC users who don’t have the benefit of knowing a PC technician.

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