How to Speed Up Your Computer For Free
Is your computer running slow or seems to take forever for your computer to start up? If so, we have a couple of free tools to help get your computer running like it was new. All of these tools are on your computer and should be run once a month to assure your computer is running a peak performance.
Step 1: Running Disk Cleanup
Your computer over time collects a lot of junk files it no longer needs. As these files get bigger and bigger over time they start to affect the performance of your computer and use up space on your hard drive. The files need to be removed from your computer to free up space and increase the performance of your computer.
How to Run the application
Click on Start à All Programs à Accessories à System Tools à Disk Cleanup
Select all the files you want to delete and hit ok.
When you install a program on your computer it creates a file or several files on your computer. These computer files are not always well organized and start to become fragmented over time. These files start to become more and more fragmented over time and this leads to programs taking longer to startup or program running slowly. This is one of the greatest reasons why your computer slows down. Disk Defragmenter will reorganize these files so they are closer together for fast read times and overall computer performance.
*Note: when running disk defragmenter it will take several hours to complete and will slow your computer down significantly. The best way to run disk defragmenter is a night before going to bed. You should let it run overnight to complete.
How to Run the Program
Click on Start à All Programs à Accessories à System Tools à Disk Cleanup
Click on Defragment and let it run.
As computers get older and older the hard drive will start to develop time defects in it. These defects will start to slow your computer down as it takes longer and longer for your computer to read the file. When running error check it scans your hard drive looking for bad sectors on the hard drive. It will first try to recover these bad sections and if unable it will move the files to a good sector of the hard drive. The second thing error check is to look through all the Windows start-up files. It scans the files looking for corrupt or bad files that aren’t working correctly. If error check finds a file that is corrupt it will rename the old fie and replace it with a new file. This will help your computer run at performance levers you expect.
To run the application
Click on Start à My Computer à Right click on the C: and go to properties à Tools tab àError Check
Check mark both boxes and click on start. You will get a message that you will need to hit ok to. Click on start and when your computer reboots it will run the error check.
When you download programs off the internet or install programs on your computer they will have a command to tells your computer to start them when your computer starts. Over time you start to get more and more of these programs starting when you turn on your computer. You start to notice that it takes several minutes for your computer just to start before you can do anything with it. Msconfig will allow you to turn off these programs from starting so that your computer will boot in seconds and not minutes. Turning off starting up programs in msconfigs will greatly increase your computers boot time.
*Note: Using msconfig in the wrong way can cause several or unrecoverable harm to your computer. Please be careful then using msconfig.
To run the application
Click on Start à Run à type in “msconfig”
Click on the Startup Tab.
Uncheck all unwanted startup programs and hit ok.
*Note: When you reboot your computer the setting will then take effect.
