There is nothing like the feeling of buying a new computer, switching it on, and marvelling at how quickly it boots up your favourite software or navigates through your photo collection. Do you remember what that felt like? Have you forgotten that your current computer which is now painfully slow used to be like that when it was new? The good news is that computer hardware doesn’t usually slow up over time. Apart from a rickety old hard drive with bad sectors that may be slowing your machine down, chances are your old PC can be sped up again with the application of a few basic tips.
1. De-fragment your hard drive.
Over time the files on your hard drive start getting broken up and stored at different ‘ends’ of the magnetic disk in your drive. This is akin to baking a cake when you store the flour in one room, the butter in the next whilst the eggs are outside in the shed. Rather than reaching into the pantry to access all the ‘ingredients’ that make up a cake (or a file!), your hard drive has to march through all the rooms and out to the shed to put together the various parts of the file you are trying to access. Bad analogies aside, de-fragmenting your drive regularly will ensure fragmented files are not slowing your machine down.
2. Uninstall unused programmes.
When you install some programmes, unbeknown to you they like to install services (services are like small applications) that often fire up when your computer is started. Even though you may not have used that old HP printer for 3 years, every time you have been booting your computer up that sneaky little service is booting up too and is of absolutely no use at all! Imagine what it is like when you have a 4 year old machine with countless programmes installed. Your poor old CPU has to run all of these services simultaneously whilst handing your normal day to day software that you like to run as well. Uninstalling unused software removes these services and helps reduce the workload on your CPU.
3. Remove viruses and spyware.
Of course this seems like common sense, but some people still don’t run virus and spyware scanners as much as they should. Having these nasties running wild in your system is never good. And apart from wreaking all sorts of other havoc with your machine, they slow it down as well.
One final tip and because it’s not a software fix I haven’t included it in the above list. If your computer doesn’t have enough RAM, then get some more! Nearly all big name computer manufacturers and many local computer assemblers are guilty of selling computers with inadequate RAM. If you are running the Microsoft XP Operating System, 1GB of RAM should be the minimum you have in there for good performance. If you are running Vista or Windows 7 then double it to 2GB. I confess that I have a particular hatred for slow computers, so in many cases 512MB for your XP machine might be fine if you just use it to check email and surf the net. For a few extra dollars though, why not chuck some more RAM in there to be sure your RAM isn’t a bottleneck for your system?
For more information on how to speed up your slow PC contact our service department now.
