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

Paul Watson, PC Technician

Thursday, January 7th 2010

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