Computer Runs Slowly--7 Easy Ways to Speed It Up

When a computer is new it will run at full speed. Exactly how fast it runs depends of course on how it is equipped. If you need a really fast computer you should invest in a high end machine with the very best processor and lots of memory.

Then again your speed for surfing the internet depends entirely on your internet connection speed. Obviously a high speed cable connection is much faster than a dial up.

When your computer seems to gradually run slower over a period of time there can be a number of reasons for this and you can correct the problems fairly easily in most cases.

1. Do you have enough memory in your machine? Anything less than 1 gigabyte of RAM is barely enough these days. If you have less you should upgrade to at least 1 Gigabyte of RAM and 2 or more gigabytes would be better. Same applies to your hard drive. If you download a lot of stuff you should have a big hard drive. A minimum of 100 gigabytes is needed these days.

2. Do you have a lot of never used programs on your hard drive? Uninstall as many as possible. The extra hard drive space will speed things up especially if you have a small hard drive. Aim to have no more than 50 to 60 percent of your hard drive space in use.

3. You should defragment your hard drive regularly to keep things running fast and smoothly. When your hard drive has bits and pieces of programs scattered all over it this greatly slows down the machine as it tries to locate the various pieces of a program. Defragmenting will bring all the pieces of each program together, where they should be, for fast access.

4. Regular use of an antispyware program will eliminate spyware which has been installed on your machine by someone unknown. You can download a free program such as Spybot or Adaware. Spyware uses up your computer resources to accomplish it's dirty work. Take it out and speed up your machine.

5. Many people will have months or even years of old emails taking up hard drive space. Remove all deleted items,sent items and old inbox items regularly and you will free up a surprising amount of hard drive room. This will enable your machine to run faster.

6. Your startup menu may be clutterd with all kinds of material which need not be there. You can access any of these programs quite easily if you need them. No need to have them slow down the booting of the machine. Edit them out of the startup menu. You don't have to delete them just get them out of startup and your boot time will be much less.

7. All Windows PCs will slow down over a period of time. The computer registry gradually becomes choked with excess material. This greatly slows down the operating system as it tries to locate the data it needs to run your computer. The solution is to remove all the unwanted data from the registry and clean it up.

If you have the necessary computer knowledge you can do this manually using the Regedit function which is installed in all Windows computers for this purpose. Regedit will give you access to the registry files and you can then delete any material you don't want in there.

A serious caution is in order at this point however. If you do not know exactly what you are doing you should not remove any data from the registry. Many entries are there for the purpose of running the computer and if you should delete any of these important files your computer could be disabled. You might even have to reinstall the operating system to get the machine going again. Needless to say you want to avoid this at all costs.

Fortunately there is a safe and easy way to remove the unecessary material from the registry. You simply need to download a registry repair application from the internet and this will take care of the problem for you quickly and easily.

There are several of these applications available for download and they do vary in performance and ease of use. We purchased and tested several of them and found that some were superior to others.

The first thing you should do is to obtain a free scan of your registry which is offered by most of these applications. This will determine whether or not you do have a registry problem and will report to you what the problems are.

You can look at this report and decide what you would like to do. The reasonable price which is charged for repairing your registry is well worthwhile and this is what we would recommend that you do.

The registry cleaner will quickly do it's work and your computer will be returned to full operating speed. Your computer will run like a new machine again.
-Pratik Kothawade