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Speed Up Your Computer: A New Year’s Resolution You Can Keep

Posted by paul on January 7th, 2010

Speed Up Your Computer: A New Year's Resolution You Can Keep

Speed Up Your Computer: A New Year's Resolution You Can Keep

There are many ways you can slow down a computer, and conversely, many ways to speed up your computer. If you’re a professional computer technician, you have a lot of time on your hands, or you’re just exceptionally motivated to find out why your computer isn’t working as fast as it did at one time, you’re likely to find many things that rob you of computer performance.

What Do Other Users Do To Speed Up Their Computers?

Assuming that you’re none of the above, you may want to know what other users do to speed up their computers. Believe it or not, the first line of attack for some folks is simply to replace the computer. In today’s economy, few people have the money to spend on “forklift” upgrades of their computer systems.

Replacing the computer is also unnecessary. There are several remedies that work wonders when it comes to speeding up the performance of your computer. If you observe these practices, you’re likely to notice a performance boost on your computer.

First, make sure you’re not running malware or viruses on your computer. Run a virus scan and make sure your computer is up-to-date. If your virus definitions aren’t up-to-date, or you find some viruses or malware, remove them immediately.

Make sure you’re not loading a number of programs you don’t need to run at startup. This is a favorite trick of application publishers. The more “auto-starting” applications you allow, the worse your computer performance is going to be.

At the same time, make sure your computer has enough memory loaded to run the programs you use. Keep in mind that minimum memory recommendations made by Microsoft apply ONLY to the operating system. If you plan to run some heavy-duty applications, consider upgrading the memory installed on your computer. Before you load up, find out the maximum amount of memory your computer will address. Don’t install more memory than your computer can handle. If your computer boots at all, the excess memory won’t do a bit of good.

Finally, do some regular maintenance on your computer. Regular maintenance includes keeping the file system pruned back, defragmenting the hard disk periodically and running a high-quality registry cleaner like RegCure. RegCure will remove orphaned code that is written into the registry. This “zombie” code can slow your computer down significantly. RegCure is trusted by millions of users around the globe to keep their PC computers running efficiently, and works in the background to make sure your computer performs the way it was designed to.

Photo Credit: Josep Mª Rosell, via Flickr

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A Little Maintenance Can Speed Up Your Computer

Posted by paul on January 5th, 2010

A Little Maintenance Can Speed Up Your Computer

A Little Maintenance Can Speed Up Your Computer

There are certain computer problems that maintenance alone won’t solve, but this doesn’t apply to most of the slow computers I’ve dealt with lately. I’ve seen a growing amount of anxiety over slow computers recently. I’m not sure if it’s because we have a new version of Windows on the market, or because people simply need to make their computers last as long as possible. (I suspect it’s a mixture of both.)

Registry Maintenance Works!

If you’ve been reading along in the blog, you know that there are certain things that will definitely impact the performance of your computer. Lack of available memory, cluttered file systems and malware are chief culprits in a lot of “slow down” situations. When you’re dealing with a computer that you’ve had for a couple of years, you may become aware of a subtle slowing, or your computer may slow down all at once.

Even though you swear you’ve done nothing, added nothing and changed nothing, your use changes and adds things to your computer all the time. The registry is a centralized database that your computer uses to keep track of just about everything your computer has, uses and does. It doesn’t keep track of files – that’s the file system’s job – but it does keep track of all of the hardware that’s attached to your computer, the settings you use and the software you have installed.

The registry, over time, can grow to millions of lines of code. Your computer is designed to process these millions of lines of code but “processing” involves more than just reading. Instructions are embedded in the registry that may cause the computer to stop processing, even briefly, the millions of lines of code in the registry.

Software products, software updates and configuration changes may leave behind useless or irrelevant instructions. The computer doesn’t know that these instructions have been rendered meaningless, so it reads and follows them, or waits for a response from a device or application that is no longer installed. Worse, it may load additional software into memory that is no longer required. That’s a double theft: first, it’s a waste of time and second, the memory this useless code uses can’t be used for something else.

That’s why I recommend the use of a registry cleaner like RegCure. A registry cleaner analyzes the information stored in your registry to determine if it’s still needed. Useless, abandoned or orphaned information gets removed and your registry becomes much more efficient. RegCure is among the most well-known and well respected registry cleaning products on the market. I wouldn’t recommend anything less!

Photo Credit: Stefano Mortellaro

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