How to Speed up Your Computer

Having a fast computer is something that ever user wants, they want to be able to switch on their PC and for it to be at the home screen within a matter of seconds. This may not be possible due to certain factors including the operating system the computers components that are installed and how old the computer is. But there are a few things computer users can do to speed up their current PC and make their waiting times a little less.

Computer Components

Computer Components are one of the main things that can slow down a computer, there are several reasons for this and they are that either the components are old and need to be changed or they are not good enough to run the computer tasks at a certain speed and take a little longer to complete tasks. One of The main computer components that can slow down a computer is the RAM (Random-Access Memory). The ram is used by the computer to access stored data in any order hence the word Random, If the ram is old it may not be able to keep up with doing alot of tasks at one time so it takes a little bit of time for it to complete tasks. 1-2 GB of RAM should make sure that the computer runs at a decent pace, There are different models of RAM so when choosing new ram for your computer make sure you pick the right model or it will not work in your PC. The next component that can slow down a computer is the Hard Drive this is not as important as the ram but also helps to speed up the computer, a decent size hard drive would be at least 160GB. This helps because if the Hard Drive is full the PC will run slower so having some free space will help the computer to run faster. The CPU (Central Processing Unit) also known as the computer processer is a very important factor when trying to speed up a PC, the CPU is the brain of a computer and carries out all the insructions of a computer program. For the new operating systems it is better to have at least a Dual Core Processor, and if you can afford it a Quad Core Processor would help a lot in speeding up your computer.

Clean Up Your Desktop

Cleaning up your desktop which is the main screen you see where most of your files and shortcuts are, will also help in speeding up your computer. Having lots of shortcuts on your desktop is fine but if you have alot of files on your desktop you might want to clean it up. This is because having files on your desktop will use up lots of operating memory, shortcuts on the other hand do not. The best place to store files is in My Documents or create folders and put files in the folders. Doing this will free up a lot of operating memory that can be used elsewhere and also help to speed up the computer.

Uninstall Programs

Another thing you can do is to uninstall programs that you no longer use because all they are doing is using up disk space and memory and if they are not being used that memory and space can be used for other programs or files.

Defragment Your Hard Drive

Defragmenting your hard drive should be one of the last things you try if all else has failed, depending on how big your hard drive is and how much space is being used defragmentation of the hard drive can take up to a few days. Defragmentation basically takes all the files on the PC and puts them in order because over time files on the PC become cluttered and are in random orders this is why it takes long for the computer to find certain files. Before defragmenting your hard drive there are some steps you should take.

1. Make sure that all your work and files are backed up on disk or and external hard drive that is not plugged in to the computer while it is being defragmented.

2. Close all programs that are open including any virus scanners, so that there are no programs open even in the system tray (In the bottom right hand corner of the screen).

Now you are ready to defragment your hard drive, remember it can take a long time and you must not use the computer while it is carrying out this process.

Operating System

Make sure you check for any updates to the operating system because these are released when bugs are found and they can make a huge difference in the computer speed. You may also want to upgrade the operating system if there is a new version out. If you still have problems you may want to try formating the computers hard drive and re installing the operating system and all your programs.

Scanning for Virusses

One final thing you can do is to scan your computer for viruses espescially if you use the internet you will want to have a good anti virus program to stop you from getting virusses. Virusses can dramatically slow down your PC so it is worth checking if you have any and also having an anti virus software to prevent yourself from getting them in future.

These are the steps you should take in order to Speed up your computer, Remember these things will not always help and they also need to be done more than once because technology is always advancing and todays new technology is tommorows old technology. I hope this has helped you to understand how to Speed Up Your Computer