Computersight -

Is your computer slower than usual? Do you turn on your computer and then go take a bath, because that’s how long it takes the computer to actually start? Have you been experiencing program crashes lately?

       As you may already have guessed, these are clear signs of a slow and sluggish computer. And it is not too uncommon; especially among home users. Unfortunately, there is no “computer secret” or software that will fix these issues once and for all. Sure, you can just spend loads of money on expensive upgrades or buy a new computer altogether; but you must realize that in order to work to its full potential, a computer requires proper and constant care and maintenance throughout its “lifetime”. Now, I don’t mean to say that you take it to the Geek Squad every 6 months and spend $600 on it per year. You can do these things yourselves for free.

So I’ll stop talking and proceed with the instructions on how to tweak your computer for a dramatic increase in speed. I’ll start with the most common methods and then move up onto the more complicated ones.

Defragment

The first thing any person would tell you when it comes to speeding up your computer is to defrag your hard disk. This is a very common and effective way of speeding one’s computer. What defragmentation does is, it takes fragmented portions of files on your system, and puts them back together, so that now your computer can find them more easily and doesn’t have to go through the whole hard drive to find portions of a file. Following are the steps to defragging one’s hard drive:

1. Click on Start, then All Programs.
2. Click on Accessories, System Tools, and then finally on Disk Defragmenter.
3. Choose your “main” hard drive. (Usually c:)
4. Click Analyze. This checks whether the disk you selected needs to be defragmented or not. If it says it does not, then you probably won’t benefit much from defragging, but if it says you need to defragment, then proceed to the next step.
5. Click on Defrag. The defragmentation may take anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours. It depends on how large you hard drive is, the amount of fragments, amount of RAM, and the processor speed.
6. When finished, you should see a slight improvement in the performance of your computer. All you must do now is close the program window.

Disk Cleanup

Another common thing to do to improve the performance of a computer is Disk Cleanup. This utility allows you to cleanup unnecessary files such as temporary internet files, offline web-pages, Publisher temporary files, and many more. This method is useful mainly for clearing more hard drive space, but it may increase the performance a little as well. Here’s how to do it:

1. Click on Start, and then open My Computer.
2. Right-click on your “main” hard drive (usually c:), and then click on Properties.
3. Click on Disk Cleanup. Wait for the Disk Cleanup to calculate how much space will be freed.
4. When the main window opens, check all of the items listed.
5. Click on OK, and let the computer remove the selected files.

Clear the Prefetch data and Recent Documents

       This is another way to get more hard drive space, which, as mentioned before, may contribute to the overall performance of a computer.

In the Prefetch folder, the computer makes copies of a lot of programs used, so that it can be accessed later on, but overtime, these files become useless and are left there with no use. To clear these unwanted files, do the following:

1. Click on Start, then Run.
2. In the dialog box, type “%systemroot%prefetch” (without the quotes) and then press Enter.
3. In the folder that opens up, delete every file you see. (Note: Don’t delete the folder itself!)

You should make it a routine to do this every week or so, since these Windows will keep making these files overtime.

Another thing to do would be to clean out the Recent Documents folder. If you rarely ever use this folder, then you don’t need it. If you don’t know what it is, then you certainly don’t need it. The Recent Doc. folder keeps a shortcut of every text file you open. These shortcuts are rarely ever used, so it’s safe to delete them. The original files will still be there, but the shortcuts won’t. Follow the following steps to clean out the folder:

1. Click on Start, the Run.
2. In the dialog box, type “%USERPROFILE%Recent” (without the quotes) and then press Enter.
3. In the folder that opens up, delete every file you see. (Note: Don’t delete the folder itself!)

This should also be done routinely to clean out unwanted shortcuts and improve the performance of your computer.

Increase Virtual Memory

This is a big step in improving the performance of you computer. The computer relies on RAM, or Random Access Memory, to open programs that have been stored on your hard drive. When you open a program, the computer transfers the files from your hard drive to the RAM. The files in the RAM are then used to open that program. If you have less than 256 mb of RAM, you computer will most likely be a slow one and you probably won’t be able to multi-task much. To fix the problem of low RAM, you could just buy more RAM and then install it, but there’s a simpler, more “free” solution to the problem. Virtual Memory is similar to RAM, but it uses your hard drive; so if you don’t have much hard drive space, then don’t consider this step. Virtual Memory uses your hard drive to make programs think they are in RAM, when in reality they have been used by the RAM, and then swapped between Virtual Memory and RAM. Increasing virtual memory will not only increase the speed of a computer, but also allow you to open bigger and more programs. It will also get rid of the “Low Virtual Memory” error. So here is how to do it:

1. Click on Start, then right-click on My Computer.
2. Click on Properties.
3. In the new window, go to the Advanced tab.
4. Click on the first Settings button.
5. Go to the advanced tab in the new window.
6. Click on the Change button at the bottom.
7. Select your hard drive (usually c:), and then select Custom.
8. Change the initial and the maximum size to 1.5 times the size of your RAM or more.

(Note: It is recommended that you keep both the initial size and the maximum size the same.)

To watch a video demonstration of the above steps, please click on this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I2iSYkZLow

Disable unnecessary start up programs

This one is probably the best and then most effective of all. When you start your computer, Windows loads a heap of programs in the background and keeps them running. This can eat up on your resources (especially you RAM). To disable these programs from starting in the background, do the following:

1. Click on Start, then Run.
2. In the dialog box, type “msconfig” (without the quotes) and then press Enter.
3. In the new window, go to the Startup tab.
4. Uncheck all programs you don’t want running in the background except for any rundll32 files, anti-virus software, and RTHDCPL, along with other files you do not know about.
5. Now, go to the Services tab.
6. Check, “Hide all Microsoft Services”. It is very important that you do this.
7. Click the Disable All button.
8. Now, check back only your anti-virus software services.
9. Now, go to the General tab.
10. Uncheck “Process SYSTEM.INI File” and “Process WIN.INI File”.

Click on Apply then OK.

This should increase the boot time and the performance of your computer dramatically. Also, do the following before you restart your computer to make the changes take effect:

1. Click on Start.
2. Right-click on My Computer, and then click on Properties.
3. Go to the Advanced tab.
4. Click on the third Settings button.
5. Uncheck, “Time to show list of Operating Systems:”
6. Click on OK and then restart your system.

Once you have done all of the above, your computer should feel like new and its boot-time should decrease a lot.

If you have any more suggestions for better computer performance please feel free add that in your comments. If you learned something new from this article and if it was helpful to you, please don’t hesitate to click on the “Like” button. I am eager to receive feedback from you all, so please comment.