How to Improve Computer Speed

How can I improve the speed of my computer?

Several things can impact the speed of your computer. Hardware upgrades will definitely help. However, at no cost there are things you can do to help your computer run faster.

This is specific to computers that run the Windows operating systems.

There are some applications native to windows that can help you maintain your computer's health. There is a simple three step process that will do wonders for the speed of your computer.

Do these steps in order:

1. Remove any unwanted programs.
Do this through Start>Control Panel>Add/Remove Programs.
Be careful what you choose to remove, if you are not sure, you should probably keep it until you find out what it is. Remove any old software that you don't use anymore. That will free up space on your hard drive, which will be useful in the next steps.

2. Run the Disk Cleanup application.
Do this through Start>Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Disk Cleanup
This application will scan your hard drive and list areas of files that you can safely remove from your computer. These are old install files, temporary files, etc. Choose to remove all the files found. (you can use the check boxes to select which get removed)

3. Run the Disk Defragmenter application.
Do this through Start>Program>Accessories>System Tools>Disk Deframenter
This application will scan your hard drive and take all the fragmented files and put them together so that they can be accessed quicker when your computer looks for them.

Doing those three steps once a month will help keep your computer running better.

What's a fragmented file?

Files get fragmented all the time. One example is when you open an existing Word or Excel file and modify it. When you save the file again it's bigger than it was, so the computer can't put it all back into the space it was using on the hard drive. You might think, "no big deal, it'll just move it to an area with enough space". In actuality it puts part of the file in the old location, and the rest in another location on the disk.

Now when the computer needs to access this file it has to find both parts and put them together to have a valid file to open. You won't notice any speed difference on one file, but as you can imagine there are files all over your computer that get updated and saved back many times. By doing the above steps you can bring all these files back together and your computer will not take as long to access them.