Tutorials by Roe - Ways to Speed up your P.C

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First thing I want to say is that if you Google something like ways to speed up my computer you'll find thousands of websites promising if you download their software you'll increase your system speed by 20 - 60 percent. I'm sorry to disappoint you but in all likelihood you'll decrease your system speed by 20 - 60 percent and more than likely install either adware, spyware, malware or all of the above. However, there are some small simple things you can do to keep your system working at its optimum performance. I'll break this down into sections so as not to confuse the new comers and of course myself. 1) First thing you must do is remove programs you never use. Simply deleting the little icon from your desktop does not delete the program or gain you any room on your hard drive. To delete a program you must go into your system and manually delete it. This isn't by any means difficult though so don't panic. Heres how its done. Press the Start Button - then press control panel - when in control panel press Add Remove Programs. This will show you a list of all Programs you have installed on your Computer and several that were on it when you bought it. Take a good look down this list of programs, you'll probably recognize some programs you thought you deleted months even years ago. If you see a program you don't want any more press it and you'll see at the right side a button appears saying remove, press the remove button and the computer will do the rest for you. Its very easy. By doing this on a regular basis and removing programs you don't use you can save a lot of space on your P.C. and allow your computer to keep working at the speed it was meant to. ****CAUTION**** When you take the above action if you come across a program and you don't know what it is then don't remove it, it may be important to your systems stability. However, don't let this put you off removing the programs you do recognize and when you press each program the computer will tell you how often you use it so this is a good hint as to whether the program is important or not. This really is an important step in keeping your system stable as if your hard drive fills up your computer will get very slow and eventually stop responding altogether. 2) A simple trick to speed up your computers start up time is to press Start - All Programs - Start up - Whatever programs are listed here are running as soon as you turn your computer on. Deleting them from this list will stop them from loading at start up and allow you to start them later at your own time. 3) Another way to stop some programs loading is to press Start - Run - Type MSCONFIG in the box that appears and hit O.K. The next box that opens hit the tab labeled start up. This will show you a list of programs that run when your system boots. To stop these programs booting untick the box beside the programs name but again if you don't recognize the program DON'T turn it off. I also recommend familiarizing yourself with the programs in this list as if a malicious program ads its self to the list later on you'll be able to recognize it as being out of place and take appropriate action by disabling it. Whenever you disable a program using MSCONFIG when you reboot your system a little grey window will open on your desktop telling you a program has been changed. This is to ensure a hacker can't make changes without you knowing about it on reboot. There will be a small tick box on this window which will say something like tick this box not to display this message again. Just tick the box and press O.K. Don't worry if anything is changed again the message will appear to let you know. Your only telling it not to display the message again for the changes you made on this occasion. 4) Another simple but effective thing to do is to increase your Virtual Memory. You do this by following these simple steps. Goto Start - control panel - system - advanced - performance settings - advance - virtual memory change - set your maximum size to 3000 which is equal to 3 Gigabytes and press set. if your hard drive size is large enough to allow you to make it this size. If you have a hard drive of even 40 Gbs or more then your fine. Increasing your virtual memory is basically like adding more R.A.M. to your system so its a good thing to do. 5) Defragmenting your Hard Drive. Now that you've deleted files and changed things you want to defragment the system. What defrag does - Think of it like this, after months to years of use your hard drive is almost full, you then come along and delete a load of things to free up space but youve deleted things from the start of your hard drive, from the middle of your hard drive and the end of the hard drive and a load of other places in between. What defrag does is take everything that remains on the hard drive and rearranges it so all your information is in the one place. This means when you search for something or a program searches for something its sure of where it is on your hard drive, rather than having to search every where bit by bit, including even empty spaces. So, heres how to defragment your drive. Goto My Computer - use your mouse and right click on the C:\ Drive - press properties - press Tools and the press Defragment now - press on the tiny image of your C:\ hard drive and then press defragment. This could take some time depending on the size of the hard drive and how much rearranging needs to be done so you may want to make a cup of tea and sit back and relax a while. Just a note - You really should defrag your computer every two months or so depending on how much you use your system. If you follow all the tips I have above on a regular basis you should definitely defragment after each session. There you go, apart from adding new hardware to your system there the only ways I can think of to maintain a good level of performance. You could of course overclock your cpu but you need to buy new fans and yould seriously decrease the life span of your processor so I don't recommend it to be honest. If any of you run into any problems give me a shout and I'll advice you and talk you through it. These are fairly easy things to do though so you should be alright. And of course as always please PRINT off the instructions before you begin. These instructions are based on the Windows X.P. Operation Platform