That Technology Magazine

As a computer ages, it seems like increasingly becomes slower and slower. Part of the problem is that newer programs require more memory and processing power. Eventually, a computer is unable to run newer applications.

The other part of the problem is that most people don’t practice regular computer maintenance. Over time, your computer becomes cluttered with spyware, programs running in the background, and a fragmented hard drive. Here are a few things you can do to speed up your windows computer.

1. Run a spyware checker and remove all spyware from your system - try a free application like Adaware or Yahoo Anti-Spy.
2. Defragment your hard drive. This is a free windows program that is already on your computer. Try running it at night before you go to bed. You’ll wake up with a better performing hard drive.
3. Uninstall any applications that you never use. This frees up hard drive space and will prevent some of these programs from using up valuable sytem memory.
4. Shut down start-up processes that you don’t need. There are 2 ways to do this. First, if you know a program is starting up everytime you boot your computer, go into that program’s settings and tell it not to run when windows starts up. Another option is to go into your system configuration and selectively remove programs from the startup process. To do this, go to start -> run -> and type msconfig. Select the Startup tab and unselect any program that you do not want to run everytime windows starts (Make sure you set a system restore point before doing this in case something goes wrong!!)
5. Install more memory. Many systems are equipped with too little memory to adequately perform multiple tasks. Adding memory is an easy and relatively inexpensive was to boost your systems performance. If you are running Windows XP, make sure that you have at least 512MB of memory. 1GB of memory should result in a significant performance increase.