How to Speed up your computer

Step 2: Defragment Your Hard Drive

As you save and delete things from your hard drive, your data gets scattered across the drive in bits and pieces, rather than solid chunks. That means your hard drive may have to look in 15 places just to retrieve a single file, rather than one, and it slows things down. Defragmenting the drive will rearrange the pieces in an order that makes more sense, speeding up access times. Just look for the defragment tool under System Tools in your Accessories folder, click “defragment,” sit back, and wait. Depending on how big your drive is, you might want to allow it to run overnight.

Step 3: Clean up Your Files

If your computer now runs much slower than when you first brought it home, it didn’t get there on its own. Somewhere along the line, you clicked “OK” on one too many checkboxes asking you to install something, popped in one too many CDs, and experimented with one too many pieces of “free” software. Now it takes five minutes to start up, gives you three different errors whenever you try to start your browser, and crashes every hour or so.

The issue is that many of the programs you install have components that run all the time, burdening your PC’s processor. For instance: iTunes is a great program, but did you know it has two components that run invisibly in the background all the time, whether you’re using them or not? Both are there to help iTunes communicate with an iPod when you plug it in, but if you don’t own one, they’re just gobbling up memory and slowing your CPU.

You can easily view a list of everything humming away in the background bring up by holding down ctrl, alt and delete to bring up the Windows Task Manager.

After combing through all the processes and weeding out ones that don’t need to run, your computer should perform much faster, especially on boot up when it no longer needs to load a dozen programs as soon as Windows opens. If not, it’s time to call in the big guns.

How to Speed up your computer
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	Step 1: Check for Viruses Your first step should be checking for viruses. When it comes to system slowdown, they’re the culprit the majority of the time, and because most good anti-virus software can remove them automatically, you won’t have to invest much time in ensuring your PC is clean. If you don't already have an anti-virus program, we suggest one of the following: Panda Antivirus Pro 2009 McAfee Family Protection STOPzilla spyware Remover Trend Micro Internet SecurityPro All of the four above are very easy to use and walk you right through the necessary steps. Step 2: Defragment Your Hard Drive As you save and delete things from your hard drive, your data gets scattered across the drive in bits and pieces, rather than solid chunks. That means your hard drive may have to look in 15 places just to retrieve a single file, rather than one, and it slows things down. Defragmenting the drive will rearrange the pieces in an order that makes more sense, speeding up access times. Just look for the defragment tool under System Tools in your Accessories folder, click “defragment,” sit back, and wait. Depending on how big your drive is, you might want to allow it to run overnight. Step 3: Clean up Your Files If your computer now runs much slower than when you first brought it home, it didn’t get there on its own. Somewhere along the line, you clicked “OK” on one too many checkboxes asking you to install something, popped in one too many CDs, and experimented with one too many pieces of “free” software. Now it takes five minutes to start up, gives you three different errors whenever you try to start your browser, and crashes every hour or so. The issue is that many of the programs you install have components that run all the time, burdening your PC’s processor. For instance: iTunes is a great program, but did you know it has two components that run invisibly in the background all the time, whether you’re using them or not? Both are there to help iTunes communicate with an iPod when you plug it in, but if you don’t own one, they’re just gobbling up memory and slowing your CPU. You can easily view a list of everything humming away in the background bring up by holding down ctrl, alt and delete to bring up the Windows Task Manager. After combing through all the processes and weeding out ones that don’t need to run, your computer should perform much faster, especially on boot up when it no longer needs to load a dozen programs as soon as Windows opens. If not, it’s time to call in the big guns.	Step 4: Adjust Visual Effects for Better Performance Windows provides a number of interesting visual effects including animated windows and fading menus. If you do not have enough operating memory, these effects can slow down your computer. Adjusting or reducing visual effects can make a difference. Step 5: Upgrade If you’re running a fresh install of Windows and still having issues running certain programs, like newer games, you’ve hit the upper limits of what you can do with the hardware you have. The first is RAM, which serves as system memory. If you tend to run a lot of programs at once and notice sluggishness when switching between them, RAM will speed things up significantly. To figure out how much you have, you can look at “System” under your Windows control panel. To figure out how much you can add, you’ll have to look under the hood, because it depends on how many sockets your motherboard has. We recommend checking out eHow.com for step-by-step advice on how to actually install the RAM, and PCWorld’s upgrade guide for specifics on selecting the right specs. RAM is incredibly cheap, so if you decide to do it, we recommend you go all the way and max out what your system can handle. The second part to consider is your video card. Chances are, if you have an inexpensive PC, you’re using integrated graphics built into the motherboard, rather than a separate graphics processing unit (GPU) with a lot more power. If you’re having issues playing 3D games, adding a GPU (or a faster one than what you have) might be enough of a speed boost to let you play titles you couldn’t have played before. Just make sure your motherboard can handle the card you buy: Older PCs use an AGP port, while newer ones use PCI Express. You can reference your computer’s manual if you’re not sure which you have. Also, be sure to choose a card toward the cheaper end (under $100) of what’s available at any given moment, since the rest of your system will act as a bottleneck on high-end cards, preventing you from taking full advantage of their power anyway.
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Step 4: Adjust Visual Effects for Better Performance