Speed up your pc

There are so many things which can cause your PC to slow physically slow down. Please note that this is quite different from you slowing down because your PC isn’t set up as effectively as it could be.

To cover both of these topics in detail would take some time and will be a video series in a few weeks time. However, in the meantime let’s look at some practical ways of how to speed up your PC. These all apply to Vista and XP.

Step 1) Clear all those unused and unneeded shortcuts and files you don’t need off your computer desktop. They should be filed away somewhere useful… subject for another post. There is school of thought that says PC’s perform better with fewer files on the desktop.

Step 2) For me the single biggest hog of resources and the thing which slows the PC down more than anything is having dozens of programs installed, which you never use. The best PC is a PC which has no software on it… Not very practical, but there we go.

To get rid of unwanted programs – trials etc – go to CONTROL PANEL>ADD REMOVE PROGRAMS and

Step 3) Stop any unneeded programs from starting up automatically and hogging memory and CPU cycles.

You can do this by going to START>RUN and typing “MSCONFIG”, which will bring up a dialogue box called System Configuration. Click the startup tab  and untick the programs which are starting up which clearly should not be… demos of trials etc…

To go the whole way with this, you could use a PC cleaning tool like CCleaner It is free and works a treat.

Step 4) Another biggie – Temporary Internet Files need to be removed – which could take up as much as 1GB of space on your hard drives.

To get rid of these files in IE7, goto TOOLS>INTERNET OPTIONS>BROWSING HISTORY DELETE> and then DELETE TEMPORARY INTERNET FILES.

Step 5) Once you’ve cleaned everything out above, make sure your PC is pugged in, pour yourself a nice glass of something one evening, and hit the defragmentation button and leave it running over night.

If that little lot doesn’t speed up your PC, then it’s time for a reinstall/new one*

*delete as applicable.

Related posts:

1. Keyboard shortcuts – Internet Explorer
2. Synchronising content at home and at work