If adding speed to a computer were only as easy as downloading a program… (Well, in some cases, it is – more later.) As I’ve said before, there are literally an uncountable number of things that can cause your computer to slow down, either temporarily or long-term. There are also a number of things you can do to either speed up or slow down your computer’s performance.

Computer Speed Isn’t Always Relative

Computer speed is sometimes related to what you’re doing at any particular moment. If you’re opening a program or performing some very complex action, your computer may need to devote the bulk of its memory or processing power to that task. That will make the computer seem sluggish or otherwise unresponsive. It’s also possible that your computer is doing something you don’t know about, such as running a program or process in the background. This can temporarily steal performance from your computer, too.

Your computer may be underpowered for the task at hand, or you may be asking it to do too much at once. This kind of performance problem can sometimes be cured by reducing the number of programs running at one time or increasing the amount of memory in your computer.

Many people don’t realize that computers can also be slowed down by the lack of adequate free space on the hard disk. If you don’t have enough free hard disk space, your computer may find it difficult to write to temporary files that some applications need to run properly. This problem can be addressed in a number of ways: first, remove programs and files you no longer need or want. Following a major cleaning, defragment your hard disk using the built in defragmenting tool provided by Microsoft. You’ll find it under the System Tools section.

If you still can’t get the available hard disk space up to at least 25% of the total volume space, consider purchasing an external hard disk to provide additional file storage space. Alternately, if your computer has a writeable CD-ROM or DVD drive, you can move some of your files off to disc in a permanent archive without having to get rid of them. This is a great way to handle video and audio files, as well as photo images that you want to preserve, but that may be robbing your hard disk of precious space.

As I mentioned earlier, you can also recover lost performance by downloading a registry cleaner program such as RegCure. If your hard disk is nowhere near full and you’re still experiencing performance problems, a good registry cleaning may be in order. RegCure does a wonderful job of locating and eliminating abandoned code that may be clogging up your registry and causing computer performance problems.

Photo Credit: Luis Argerich, via Flickr