Computer running slow - Speed up or improve.

Community Help: Slow Computer - Tips for improvement

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If your computer is running slow, there are alot of things you can do to improve it. There are both hardware and software improvements you can do, the software improvements being the easiest of course:

  • First, run your disk defragmenter. Look on your programs menu under accessories or on your desktop, all machines typically have a disk defrag. This rearranges the drive to remove empty space. This will improve performance and should be done at lesat once a month or so.

  • Clean up the extra garbage data you have on your machine. Often this can slow down browsing. There are many programs to do this, and even some of the cleanups are in your browser options. Download a cleanup program like Complete Cleanup and do all the cleanups listed on the main page. This will eliminate alot of garbage data and free up disk space. Do this once a week or so.

  • Check what you have running at startup. Click start-run and type msconfig, go to your startup tab and make sure you don't have excess junk running in the background on your pc. The program I listed above also has options to cleanup the startup items, and also cleanup the BHO entries. These things are the types of things that really can slow down your computer and internet browsing speed, as things running in the background can consume all your computer resources and bandwidth. Keep it clean.

  • Slow computers can also be caused by resource leaks, reboot your pc every few days if you are someone that leaves it on all the time. Rebooting will help reclaim all lost memory, etc.

  • The cheapest and easiest hardware way to speed up your computer is to upgrade your RAM memory. For example, doubling your memory will make a HUGE improvement in loading and unloading programs, games, etc. Its also easy to snap in new ram memory, you can simply buy a new chip and put it in yourself, lots of info on the net explain this. Maximizing your ram is a way to make your pc run like a new machine, and extend the life of your computer!

  • Add a new graphics card to your computer. This one is more difficult to install because of the potential problems. Sometimes there are more compatibility issues, as there are other bottlenecks besides just the graphics card. For example a 3 year old computer with a brand new graphics card, may not be able to utilize all the power of the new card, so you want to put in the maximum card your machine can utilize so you don't waste the money buying a higher cost card. However if you are a game player, upgrading the RAM and video card will certainly make your computer run like a brand new machine. When you buy new computers, you basically pay for the video card and motherboard chip, as everything else is relatively cheap, so the video card can be expensive but well worth the upgrade as far as speed and performance goes!

  • I can tell you from personal experience, I changed the memory (tripled it) and added a video card 4 times larger then my current one (on a pc that was only 2 years old), and my pc ran faster then anything new you could find. Upgrading the hardware can have huge changes in the life of your computer even for gamers. I also keep the garbage data clean on my pc, no excess junk running and no excess garbage data accumulated, and it makes a big different in speed. garbage data accumulated, and it makes a big different in speed.