Tips on how to Improve Your Computer's performance

Read this article if you are you curious on how your hard drive gets fragmented. Don't worry, the article wont bombard you with so much techie stuff.

If you have started to notice that your computer is slowing down, there may be some things you can do to recover back its speed.Something is causing it to slow down and these may be one of the things that cause it to slow down:

Uninstall Programs

You may have installed a lot of programs in your computer recently. Some programs can slow down your computer because they run in the background. Too many background programs or processes can slow down your computer significantly. Check it using task manager. Pres CTRL + ALT + DEL or in Windows 7 right-click the taskbar then click start task manager. Click the performance tab then check your CPU usage and Memory usage. If the computer is idle and the CPU usage is spiking up then a program may be unnecessarily using up resources. If the Memory usage is unusually high – i.e. it reached 1GB even if all programs are closed, too many background programs are running. Consider uninstalling unnecessary or unneeded software.

Disable Startup Objects

Startup objects are those programs that automatically run when turn on your computer. Having too much of these can slow down your system start up. Disable unneeded startup objects using system Configuration. To open this application, click start then type “msconfig” in the run dialog box. Click the startup tab then look at what you can disable. You disable them by un-checking the check box.

Defragment your Hard Drives

File fragmentation is another cause of system slow down. It causes data to be loaded slower by your hard drive. File fragmentation is a result of write-erase cycles you do on your drive. Blocks of data make up a file and sometimes, to maximize the disk, they are not stored alongside each other – not contiguous. When the drive is heavily fragmented, your hard drive is like trying to read from a book that has its pages jumbled up. If you try doing that you’ll know that it is inefficient. To defragment a drive, open my computer, right click on a drive you want to defragment then click properties then the tools tab, then choose defragment now.

Clean Up the Registry

During the life of a computer it undergoes program installations and uninstallations, and a lot of changes in settings. This can lead to invalid registry entries to remain in you registry. The registry is like a logbook which keeps records of programs and settings. To open your registry enter “regedit” in run. To clean up your registry, use a registry cleaning program like CCleaner or Tune-up Utilities.

Check for Virus and Malware

Viruses and Malware programs are unwanted and potentially dangerous programs. It is dangerous because they can compromise your privacy and identity. They use your computer to do malicious things like spam mail, do unwanted and dangerous changes in your computer and they spread themselves through external storage or your network or the internet. They eat up resources so they can really slow down your performance. Use a decent antivirus program. I recommend AVG – it’s free, or Kaspersky – it’s better but you have to buy a license for the program each year. The problem with some antivirus software is that they sometimes can’t detect an infection and sometimes they detect a virus even if it’s not really a virus. This is usually happens with Avira and AVAST.