Help Speedup My Slow Computer!

There are many reasons for a computer to become sluggish and slow during loading up and while in windows. Some are easier to identify and fix than others. Some of the common ones and some tips to fix the problem are:

Full Hard Drive
Your computer requires a certain amount of space on the hard drive to run efficiently. Many people think that simply having enough RAM will suffice but that is only partially correct. If your hard drive is full to bursting a simple way to speedup your computer is to delete some files! There is often plenty of junk you can remove from your internet cache and searching through your hard drive for old files you do noo want to can move to a USB drive or burn to CD/DVD

Viruses, Spyware & Malware
Spyware & Malware are terms you may or may not have heard of before but they are similar to a virus which can infect your computer. Spyware does not usually damage your computer but can slow down processes and browsing the web as it monitors and reports what you are doing to whoever infected your computer with it. Malware is much more troubling. Often very sophisticated it can pretend to be legitimate programs and can be very hard to track and destroy.

Some excellent programs to get rid of these things are:
SpyBot Search and Destroy
AdAware
AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition

Too Many Start-up Programs
This is quite common and i am guilty myself of letting this get out of control. Often we install programs which add completely safe processes on startup. This is not a bad thing in itself but when the computer has to deal with too many of these your loading time into windows can become a frustratingly slow experience. To manually get rid of just the non-essential startup programs here is how you do it:

Click the 'start' button then the 'run' option. In the text box that appears type 'MSConfig' and hit enter.
This brings up some options for you. Choose the 'startup' tab and you will see a list of programs that run on loading windows. You can de-activate them from here but only do this with programs you know are not essential. If in doubt it is best to leave it. Some malicious programs are added here also so if something looks suspect check the malware links above.

Messy Registry
Now this is by far the hardest to pick and fix but also one of the main reasons why computers over time become much slower. When you install and uninstall programs it can often leave orphaned registry entries where windows used to keep details on these programs. If you do not follow uninstall processes properly this becomes even worse. It is also very difficult to manually go through and fix these things ... i know, i have done it before! If you are tech savvy and want a challenege and do not mind if you accidentally screw it up you can go through this but make a backup of the registry first:

• On the desktop, click the Start button on the left bottom corner
  
• Click Run
  
• A new window to "run" commands
  
• Type regedit
  
• Click OK
  
• At the top of the window click File
  
• Go down to Export
  
• Type a name for the backup file, and click Save

After you have this backup check out the registry editor again and on the left side you can see how the computer is configured.

Click on the plus sign to expand a section of the registry editor. The "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE." is probably the most well used area for software and hardware and should be looked into first. You can go through this and remove those that are not needed but beware of deleting the wrong things. The software is probably the easiest part but the other sections can get tricky and if not done right can crash your machine.

If this sounds too hard there is an easier and much better way which i now recommend to people with very slow machine ... Keep reading for how to do this.

Editing your own registry is time consuming and can be stressful if you do it wrong and are forced to either reload your backup or sometimes deal with a computer that no longer works because you removed the wrong entry. I have done this ... the time it took to reinstall everything was not worth it.

I now know you can short cut this with a really good download called registry fix. This software can detect and repair problems in your registry with a single click. It will scan everything and fix only what is not going to hurt your system.

When i ran it on my computer which i thought i had running quite well it picked up 127 errors! I noticed a boost in speed on loading and on the net as well.

So If you have tried the other fixes i have listed and are still asking "help speedup my slow computer!" then i highly recommend downloading this software.