How to speed up a computer running very slow

There's a number of reasons. Computers have a limited ammount of processing power, so a lot of programs running simultaneously can slow a computer down considerably. Another reason is that some operations that are performed on the computer's hardware are slow due to the design of the hardware. For example both the hard drive and RAM is used to store information, however, RAM is many times faster at storing information (it's drawback being that it only stores the information until you power off the system). As such disk operations such as checking files with an antivirus or defragmenting a hard drive, or checking the hard drive, slow down your system considerably, and even loading programs from the disk slows down your computer. In this article, I'll try to explain in detail how to optimize your computer in order for it to run faster.

If you don't want all the hassle of messing with your computer in order to configure it, there are tools like Speedy PC Pro and PC Health Advisor that try to automatically optimize your computer in the best way possible. If, however, you're interested in how to optimize your computer by hand, read on!

Although there are many viruses out there, if you have one your system doesn't slow down. A virus or spyware is a program like others, it's not aimed at performing resource intensive tasks. However if you have a lot of viruses, trojans, worms and spyware, these programs do slow your system down just because they usually start up along with Windows and there's a lot of them and each needs a bit of resources. So if you don't have an antivirus protecting your computer 24/7 - get one.

If you're not sure whether you have malware on your computer or not, download NoAdware.Net and use it to scan your computer for these programs.

Spyware is just a special case of a more general problem: too many programs loading at Windows startup. Most of the programs you install don't need to load when your computer boots up. However there are some programs (RealPlayer, Java, Quicktime) that register themselves or some of their components to start automatically each time you boot your computer without even asking you whether you'd like that or not. These components may update that program, or allow you to access it from the system tray, or do something different. In order to remove these programs from the list of programs that start along with Windows itself, Windows has a tool called MSCONFIG. To run MSCONFIG click on the Start button and depending on whether you have Windows XP or Windows Vista either click Run or click on the search field and enter 'msconfig'.

In the MSCONFIG utility switch to the Startup tab and you should see something like the above although with a lot more items, probably. Some of these you may want to disable, others you might prefer to leave starting up. It's up to you which ones you should keep running. If you're not sure whether you should leave or remove some program because you're not sure what it does, there's a great list of programs you may find on the Startup tab along with descriptions of what they do, it can be found here.

The page file is used so that programs could have more memory than would be available to them if Windows only used physical memory. By default Windows chooses the size of the page file in the way it thinks is best and when that is not enough the file is expanded. However this way the file is susceptible to fragmentation described below. So before doing the next step it's better to first set up Windows so it uses a fixed size page file.

To do this you have to do the following:

• Click Start, right click on the Computer icon and choose Properties.


• If you're using Windows Vista click Advanced system settings on the left, if not skip this step.


• In the window that appeared click on the Advanced tab and click Settings under the Performance section.


• Click on the Advanced tab in the Performance Options window and click Change under the Virtual Memory section.


• If you're using Windows Vista untick the box that says "Automatically manage the page file size on all drives".


• Choose drive C: and click on the "Custom size" option.

It's generally a good idea to enter twice the amount of recommended memory as both the initial memory and the maximum memory. The recommended memory is stated in the "Total paging file size for all drives" section. After entering the values click OK and restart your computer.

Disk fragmentation occurs when a file needs to be broken up into several fragments in order to be stored on the hard drive. Due to the way hard drives work, fragmentation means it will take more time to read a file from the hard drive. If you'd like to know more about why this happens, you can read the entry from Wikipedia.

To defragment the hard drive Windows contains a tool called Windows Defragmenter. However, I recommend using Diskeeper 2008, since it's quite a lot better than the default Windows Defragmenter (you can look at the comparison chart here). Unfortunately it's not free so here are instructions on how to run the Windows Defragmenter.

To defragment using the Windows Defragmenter for Windows XP, click Start, click Run and enter 'dfrg.msc', in the Disk Defragmenter choose drive C: and click Defragment.

If you're using Windows Vista, then to run the defragmenter click Start and enter 'dfrgui' in the search field. In the Disk Defragmenter click the Defragment Now button.

The Windows Registry was introduced along with Windows 95 as a replacement for all the ini files that were used for storing configuration options before. The registry is a centralized place for all of the configuration options not just for windows itself but also for all other programs. There are some benefits of this approach, but also there are disadvantages. For example not all of the programs uninstall correctly, file associations, options specific to the program, some changes to the operating system a program makes and other things may be left behind. As a result of this the registry becomes bloated with garbage, and because the registry is loaded into memory as a whole, the bigger the registry the more time it takes to read it. So the registry should be cleaned routinely. Unfortunately there is no tool in Windows to do this, so I would recommend using one of the programs I mentioned before, for this task.

Windows has these special programs called "services". Some of them you need enabled, others you don't. However, the services are what the system depends on, and if disabling the programs that run on startup only disabled these programs and the worst thing that could happen if you disabled the one you need was that your iTunes could stop automatically updating, disabling services that you need may prevent Windows from functioning the way it should, so proceed with caution here, and write down which services you are disabling and what their previous state was, so that if something goes wrong you could return the settings back to what they were by booting into Safe Mode (to do that you have to press F8 when Windows is booting up)

If you're using Windows XP, then click Start, click Run and enter 'services.msc' in the dialog and consult this article on which services you should disable. If you're using Windows Vista then click Start and enter 'services.msc' in the search field and consult this article on what services you should disable.

In order to speed up Windows even more, you can turn off some or all of the visual effects. This, however, is sacrificing looks for speed. To disable some or all of the visual effects, do the following:

• Click Start, right click on the Computer icon and choose Properties.


• If you're using Windows Vista click Advanced system settings on the left, if not skip this step.


• In the window that appeared click on the Advanced tab and click Settings under the Performance section.