5 Ways to Speed Up Your Computer
1. Disk Cleanup
Your computer stores all of the text and images of every web page you visit.
This utility will remove these unneeded files that are taking up space on
your Hard Dive and that will speed up you computer. Use the instructions
below to run the program.
Go to Start button then All Programs, next to Accessories, then System Tools, finally click on Disk Cleanup. It will then ask you what drive you want to clean. Choose the default choice as this is most likely the one that needs cleaning. It will then tell you that it is calculating the space that you will save and this could take a few minutes. When they say it could take a few minutes they are not kidding so let it do it's thing. When it finishes it will give you a choice of check boxes, each cleans a different aspect of your computer make sure the following boxes have a check in them, Temporary files, and recycle bin, if the computer checks additional boxes you can leave those checked if you wish. You can check all the boxes if you wish, it will just clean out everything. Then sit back and let the program do it's thing.
2. Run Disk Defragmenter
Your computer reads information much faster than it writes it. In order to get information loaded into the hard disk it sometimes shotguns the information in little pieces onto various places on your hard drive. Then when it needs to open that file or edit it, it has to find all the little bits or fragments in order to open it. This puts a great deal of extra wear and tear on your computer and slows things down. In order to fix this at least once a month run the Microsoft Disk Defragmenter. You can find it by going to the start button --> then --> accessories -->system tools and then Disk Defragmenter
3. Background Programs
Something else that can slow your computer down is extra programs running in the background. All the the programs in the startup folder in All Programs start and run when your computer boots. Any programs that you don't need running all the time you can remove from that folder and it will speed up your computer system.
4. Spyware
A large problem of in computer systems today, is the spyware that is picked up from Internet use. You can remove spyware with a program such as Spybot Search & Destroy, Ad-Aware, or AVG anti spyware. Us one of these programs once a week to clean out the spyware that accumulates with normal Internet use.
5. Uninstall unused programs
Let's face it we all have programs on our computer that we don't use. You can use Add/ Remove programs in the control panel to uninstall programs that you don't use and that will free up a lot of your systems resources.
Contributed by Erik Ehresman of Brainstormpc.com