Computers age more quickly than other equipment does, partially because the computer manufacturers are always coming out with newer, better, faster and cheaper components that expand the capacity of a computer and reduce its cost at the same time. This fact, along with several habits users may adopt, can add up to a slow computer.

Eliminating Bad Habits That Can Lead To A Slow Computer

What You’re Doing: Storing files on the desktop. This sneaky little habit can cause your computer to devote extra memory to your OS on top of what it’s already devoted to the file system. Each document or other item that is stored on the desktop takes up valuable operating memory.
What You Should Be Doing: Saving your files in the file system. Microsoft creates folders like your Downloads and Document folders to help you avoid storing files on the desktop. Use these folders when you download files or create documents. If you don’t like doing that, develop a structure within your file system to save your files. Don’t store anything on the desktop!

What You’re Doing: Running the standard installation routine. When you download or install a new application, the Setup.exe file or the installer file usually has a pre-programmed installation routine that stores the application files in a particular place in the file structure. It also adds the other files (like libraries) you may need to get the application to work properly. The installer routine often enters your new application into the “startup items” file set, meaning that the new application will start automatically. It also adds the application to the Start Menu and/or Task Bar, and puts an icon on the desktop.
What You Should Be Doing: Select “Custom Install” to look at exactly what the installer plans to do. Eliminate the extras like the Start Menu add-on, the startup items entry, the desktop alias and/or the Task Bar add-on. Start programs that you won’t use every day manually. The more extras you can eliminate from the standard installation routine, the better off you’ll be.

In my next post, we’ll cover three other tips that can help you change your work habits as they relate to your slow computer. Once you’ve purchased a computer, you can’t improve your hardware performance very much – at least not without spending more money. You can correct work habits that rob your computer of operating memory and lead to a slow computer, however!

Photo Credit: Domenico Nardone, via Flickr

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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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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Problems arise in computers all the time. Some problems need to be fixed immediately because they impact the way the computer operates. Other problems tend to “accumulate” over time and may not even be noticeable at first. When you finally decide that you do have a problem, the solution may not be apparent because you can’t say exactly when the problem started occurring, much less what exactly is going wrong. So how do you speed up your computer when you’re not sure what the problem is?

Windows Has Some Helpful Tools

Even if you know nothing about a computer aside from the location of the power switch, you can still do some basic troubleshooting to fix your slow computer. If you want to tackle the task of finding out what’s slowing down your PC, you’ll need to make some observations.

Shut your computer down and restart it. Restarting isn’t really a magic bullet, but if something’s gotten corrupted in temporary memory, or a part of the OS isn’t working properly, a hard reset might just do the trick. (Besides, restarting the computer is cheap and easy to do.)

Watch the computer as it starts up to see if you notice anything different about your computer. The computer will do a number of self-tests before it gets to the meat-and-potatoes of the OS. When the OS starts to load, see how long it takes to go from start screen to working computer. If this task seems to take longer than it did in the past, you may have many startup items configured to load into memory each time the computer starts. If this is the case, check the Task Manager (Ctrl+Ald+Delete) to get a handle on what’s running. If you see programs that are not necessary, reconfigure your startup items to exclude the unnecessary items.

Caveat: Don’t disable your anti-virus and anti-malware software.

Run disk cleanup, a free utility that comes with Windows. Disk cleanup will get rid of old bits of code on your hard disk and in your file structure that you no longer need. If you need heavy-duty help with this task, consider using a registry cleaner like RegCure. The registry cleaner isn’t the same thing as disk cleanup, so you can use both products as they’re needed.

Once your hardware is clean, reboot to see if this improves your computer performance.

Photo Credit: Alex Pearson, via Flickr