No one likes dealing with a slow computer. For most people, the source of the slowdown isn’t evident, and that makes troubleshooting even harder. More often than not, low computer performance seems to sneak into the picture, often leaving users wondering exactly what’s happened.

There Are Things You Can Do To Speed Up Your Computer!

If you’re looking for an immediate burst of speed, try eliminating open programs, document windows, and processes that don’t need to run all the time, even in the background. Don’t look for “savings” by turning off your virus or malware protection. These software packages need to run all the time. Also you can uninstall software that is unwanted, great to free up more PC resources. Also, try closing applications as you finish with them and paring down the apps that automatically load when you run the computer. Remove excess fonts, foreign language support and other items that may be part of a standard installation routine, but are for the most part unnecessary.

Add more memory to your computer. If your computer isn’t already maxed out on memory, consider installing the maximum amount of memory allowed by the computer’s design. Don’t bother installing more than the maximum and be sure you get the type of memory recommended for your computer. Too much, too little or the wrong kind of memory can cause serious performance degradations and will generally make your computing experience intolerable.

Clean, clean, clean. Clean out unneeded files from the file system. Remove all files that you’ve “temporarily” stored on the desktop. Remove unused applications, demo programs that may have come loaded with your computer when it was brand new, and eliminate temporary files. (Don’t eliminate temporary folders because many apps need those. Just eliminate the files inside.) Defragment your hard disk regularly to make the most use of your newfound disk space. Clean your registry.

Some people ask if cleaning a registry is necessary and I always say, “Only if you want your computer to run efficiently.” Cleaning out your registry periodically removes all of the “build-up” that would otherwise get left behind by applications that have been uninstalled, drivers and other components that have been replaced or upgraded, and old configurations. You don’t appreciate how quickly these can add up to diminished performance until you run a registry cleaner. I recommend RegCure for the task. It’s complete, easy-to-use and very thorough. It also makes a backup of your registry before it makes any changes, so reverting to your previous state is as easy as pie.

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When it comes to your poor typing skills, ff you’re hoping to blame a slow computer on stiff joints in your hands, hold that thought. A new study just published in the journal Arthritis Care and Research shows that people who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis could type just as fast as subjects who did not suffer from the disease. The study did show that the best predictors of typing ability were training and the age of the typist.

Improving Computer Skills Can Improve Speed

If you avoid using the computer because your data entry skills are lacking, consider taking a typing course or working with typing software. There are several free online typing test sites that can help you measure your typing speed and accuracy. Most sites are associated with a typing tutor program or software that is designed to help you learn how to touch-type.

In addition to online sites that can help measure your typing skills, you can consider using typing tutor software. The software will provide typing exercises that will help you learn the keyboard without having to look at the keys. Believe it or not, looking at the keyboard actually slows you down when it comes to typing! Your brain must verify the location of the keys you’re looking for. That visual confirmation actually reduces the efficiency of your data entry.

Worried about making mistakes? When you use programs like word processors, you can enable spell-checking and automatic error correction. Even if you type a word incorrectly, the computer can often figure out what you meant and make the appropriate substitutions. One word of caution regarding spell checking: the spell-checker won’t correct grammatical errors or word misuse. For example, if you mean to type “the” but accidentally type “she” the spell-checker will not flag the mistake because, after all, “she” is spelled correctly.

Some more advanced word processing programs also offer grammar checkers that may or may not flag misused words. Grammar checkers are not as sophisticated as spell-checkers, primarily because there is widespread agreement on the spelling of a word, whereas the rules of grammar are often circumstantial.

You can also benefit by working with tutorials or taking classes on more complicated computer applications, like spreadsheets and databases. Learning how to get the results you want from your software can improve your performance, which may make the computer seem to work a little faster for you!

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If you’ve already made the conversion from some other version of Windows to Windows 7, you should have noticed that the boot time for the Windows 7 computer is noticeably faster than earlier versions of the OS. In Windows Vista, Microsoft played some games with how the OS loads to give the illusion that the computer was booting faster than it really was. Microsoft was hoping to leave you with the impression that you didn’t have a slow computer after all.

Boot Up And Wait

The shell game works until you want to use a part of the OS that the computer hasn’t loaded yet. You know the drill: click on something and wait… and wait… and wait. With Windows Vista, the OS would “guess” what you were interested in using based upon the applications you normally use. When you did something unexpected, your reward was waiting for the OS to finish loading.

With Windows 7, Microsoft has streamlined the bootup routine and has removed some bottlenecks that added precious second (which always feel like hours) to the boot time of the computer. No games this time; the computer really does boot faster than it did. (It shuts down faster, too but that’s a different post.)

Microsoft has identified a condition that could affect some computers running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 that will indeed cause the computer to boot much more slowly than it should. The bug occurs when computers running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 are connected to a high-resolution monitor that is set to some value other than 96 dpi. Bootup can be very slow under this particular configuration.

For most users, this won’t have any impact because the default dpi display setting is 96 dpi. If you’ve gone into the Control Panel and tweaked the dpi setting to make your on-screen display smaller or larger than the default, you could have a slow boot experience the next time you fire up the computer. To eliminate the problem, switch the default dpi display setting back to 96 dpi. If you gotta be you and use a different dpi setting, Microsoft does have a hotfix available for this little gotcha.

Under most circumstances, your boot times should be pretty speedy with Windows 7. If you do experience slowness, or you want to avoid acquiring a slow computer over time, consider loading RegCure onto your Windows 7 computer. RegCure is a trusted registry cleaner and works on all versions of Windows. RegCure can help keep your computer running as quickly as the manufacturer intended.

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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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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.

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