Is your computer slowing down?
If you find yourself getting frustrated and annoyed at your slow computer, you are not alone. Most PC owners are likely to face problems sooner or later. Often within a few months of buying a PC, you may notice that it is not performing like new. Unfortunately, most people do nothing until their PC becomes frustratingly slow and leads to a major loss in productivity.
Even if you’re extremely careful about how you use your computer and never download questionable material, over time it is inevitable that your system will accumulate unwanted registry entries, errors, clutter and debris. While some of the slowing down of your computer can be attributed to the burden on its resources, most of the time, computer slowdowns are just symptoms of some other underlying issue. You can go a long way towards preventing these slowdowns and take care of most PC problems on your own if you take care of things yourself.
The most common causes are the installation and removal of software, online games, application crashes and upgrades of software programs. Also, your computer is likely experiencing problems with its registry database, the operating system component that stores information about the system, application settings and hardware.
Clean and defrag your hard drive: Your hard disk starts getting cluttered from the day you start working on a new computer as all kinds of data gets continuously added and deleted from it. After a while, it may be difficult to find anything on your hard disk. This situation can be avoided by using the Disk Cleanup and Disk Defragmenter tools. While the former will help you get rid of unnecessary clutter, the latter will help you reorganize the files in your hard disk to make them faster to access. These are system tools provided by your operating system and they go a long way in making your system fast. There are also many free and paid disk defragmenter tools available should you go that route.
On a personal note though not considered a disk defragmenter tool I use these two fine programs to help keep the clutter from browser activity, normal computer usage, etc.. to a minimum.
Install programs carefully: It is easy to get carried away and install many new and exciting applications on your computer. The flip side of this is that every time you do that you put an additional burden on your computer. Also, each of these applications bring along their own specific bugs and errors. Make sure you install application which you are sure to use and uninstall unwanted ones immediately. You can use the Add/Remove Programs utility available in your Control Panel to achieve this. If the software is large or if there are some problems with the un-installation process, you may use a good, third-party program uninstaller tool to do the job.
Keep the registry optimized: It has been observed that slow computers tend to have bloated and cluttered windows registries. In addition to the bad performance of your PC, an unhealthy registry is known to cause numerous registry errors and disrupt your work. Therefore, you must maintain a healthy windows registry. This can be achieved either by manually editing your registry or by simply downloading a popular registry cleaner from the Internet. I’ve used many registry cleaners and I must strongly advise against manual editing of the registry unless you are sure of what you are doing. Otherwise you can render your computer inoperable.
Here is the application that I like to use for a nice optimized registry.
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/
Popularity: 23% [?]
Excellent article and very well written. These tips are right on!