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Does Your Computer Run Slower Now?
Does your computer seem to run like a 20 year old car? Does it seem like it's lost most of its horsepower and is just going slower and slower every day? There is a good chance that you have been neglecting routine maintenance on your computer. Taking care of this kind of routine maintenance will make your computer a whole lot faster.
Does your computer seem to run like a 20 year old car? Does it seem like it’s lost most of its horsepower and is just going slower and slower every day? There is a good chance that you have been neglecting routine maintenance on your computer. Taking care of this kind of routine maintenance will make your computer a whole lot faster.
There are several things listed here below that you can do yourself even if you don’t consider yourself to be all of that literate of a computer user. For the most part they are free things that you can do yet if you took your computer to a shop they would most likely charge you $100 or more to perform these routine things. You really can do these things yourself and much much more to make your computer run faster.
If your computer is a few months old the first thing that you need to consider doing is going in to the control panel of your computer into the accessories group and running the defrag program. This defrag program will arrange the files on your hard drive in a more logical fashion so that your computer can find these files quicker when it needs them.
While the defrag program will organize the files on your hard drive in a more efficient and effective manner you should then also run the program that checks for bad sectors on your hard drive. Bad sectors on your hard drive will slow down your computer’s access to the hard drive. Running this bad sector utility will help you by repairing bad sectors or instructing the computer to work around them effectively.
Then make sure that you do not have any spyware or your computer. Spyware is computer software that unethical merchants sneak onto your computer through your Internet connection. You must take concrete steps to protect yourself from spyware. Either take advantage of the free software from Microsoft designed to protect you from spyware or increase the level of your protection by spending $30 or $40 for a corporate level anti-spyware program. A commercial version will seek out and destroy any spyware already on your computer and then prevent additional spyware from being installed on your computer in the future.
Now you want to go through your computer’s control panel and uninstall any programs that you find on your computer that you have never used or have not used for a long time. You will also find programs that the manufacturer installed. There is a high likelihood that you found them useless and never actually did anything with them. Go to your control panel, generate a list of programs in your computer and then be merciless in going through the list and uninstall any program that you have not used in the last year. This will free up even more room on your hard drive for more efficient access.
This next tip will probably cost you in the range of $50-$100 but if you spend a significant amount of time on your computer and have been frustrated at how slowly it is running then it will be a very wise decision indeed. Find out how much random access memory your computer is running with at this time. Perhaps the easiest way is simply to open up the instruction book that came with your computer. If you are a complete and total novice simply write down the name and model number of your computer and take it to your local store that stocks memory sticks. You will find many of the largest chain stores sell these memory sticks. Just ask the salesperson there to determine what kind of memory you need and how much you can add to your computer then take that memory stick home and in 10 minutes time you will discover that you can easily install it yourself.
These have been just a few of the things that you can do to make your computer run faster. These are easy things for you to do. You do not have to be a computer savvy person in order to accomplish them. And once your computer starts running faster you will be looking for additional things to do to make it run even faster still. Naturally there are lots of additional tweaks the average person can do for their computer and we can help you with that information below.