Posts Tagged ‘speed up your computer’
Get More Speed Out Of Your Slow Computer
Get More Speed Out Of Your Slow Computer
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 The computer has no way of knowing that the information is no longer valid, so it can waste time reading (and waiting for phantom device responses) information that doesn’t amount to anything important.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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Speed Up Your Computer: A New Year’s Resolution You Can Keep
Speed Up Your Computer: A New Year's Resolution You Can Keep
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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Need To Speed Up Your Computer? Try These Suggestions
Need To Speed Up Your Computer? Try These Suggestions
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
Need To Speed Up Your Computer?
Need To Speed Up Your Computer?
Three Things That Might Speed Up Your Computer
If speed and performance are your only considerations for a computer, you’ll want to work with a minimal set. Take a good look at your computer and remove absolutely everything except what you need to get your work done. This includes paring down to the basic desktop themes, removing old applications, updating your virus and malware scanners, cutting out all extras that will hog memory and slow your computer down. Use the Task Manager after you boot up to see what’s running. Certain programs may be configured to start up automatically. If you don’t run these programs every time you use the computer, there’s really no reason to let these programs load up. Get rid of as much stuff as you can.
Scan your computer for viruses and malware. These nasties can easily steal memory and disk space. They also leave behind an exceptional amount of trash. They often write their malfeasance to the registry, leaving a big mess to clean up. Get your virus definitions and your malware software up-to-date. Scan the daylights out of your system and remove anything you find. If your A/V scanner finds something and you don’t know what it is, do a little research. When you know what you’re dealing with, get rid of it. If you’ve found something that’s written itself to the registry, use a reputable registry cleaner like RegCure to mop up the leftovers this malware leaves behind.
Don’t upgrade your computer. At least not yet. Check your system carefully to find out what kind of performance improvement you can get from upgrading your OS. Depending upon what you’re running – hardware- and software-wise – an upgrade may not be in your best interest. Upgrades to hardware or software can require additional memory. If a memory upgrade isn’t part of your upgrade plan, installing new hardware or software might simply make your performance problems worse. Always check out hardware and software requirements carefully before committing to an upgrade of any kind.
Photo Credit: Blake Patterson, via Flickr
Flash Drive Can Speed Up Windows Vista Computer
Flash Drive Can Speed Up Windows Vista Computer
Inexpensive Flash v. Expensive RAM
You can find an inexpensive USB flash drive just about anywhere these days. The larger retailers like Target will have these on sale as a back-to-school item. (If you don’t remember ever seeing flash drives on your school supply list, let me just say that times have changed and we’ll leave it at that.) The size of the flash drive doesn’t matter too much, so you can get away with using the smaller capacity drives –these will typically set you back less than $10.
Plug your USB flash drive into an available port and open the Removable Disk (F:) Properties panel by right-clicking on the Removable Disk icon. Activate the ReadyBoost tab and choose Use this device. Set the slider to reserve a certain amount of the space available on the flash drive for system use. The rest of the flash drive will be available for file storage, but the reserved amount will be used by the system as temporary memory.
Using ReadyBoost will effectively “upgrade” your computer’s installed memory, and make it easier to run multiple programs and process large files. It can also be helpful at boot-up and shut-down, when the computer is performing many additional operations that require a lot of memory.
The ReadyBoost option isn’t a perfect substitute for upgrading your computer’s RAM, however it does provide a less-expensive alternative to buying additional memory. This is the ideal solution for computers that may only have one memory slot, like a laptop. For these computers, a memory upgrade means taking your old memory chip out and replacing it. Unless you can sell the original memory chip or find another use for it, you could end up turning perfectly good memory into a wasted investment.
ReadyBoost is a new introduction to Windows Vista, so this option isn’t available for older versions of Windows. In my book, ReadyBoost is yet another reason to consider an upgrade to Vista if you haven’t already done so. You can also make a flash drive bootable with Vista and turn your flash drive into a low-cost, low-hassle way to create a dual-boot system.
Photo Credit: Ambuj Saxena, via Flickr
