by Dan O’Halloran for Techlicious
Easy Tips To Speed up Your Slow Computer
If your PC is taking a long time to start up or perform even simple functions, it’s time to look under the hood to see what’s bogging it down. Sound daunting? Don’t worry. There are simple steps you can take to get your system running at top speed—even for those that generally don’t feel comfortable mucking around in a world of bits and bytes.
Remove unnecessary start up programs
One of the biggest culprits in slow startup times are all the programs Windows automatically loads every time you start your computer. There are programs that are important to have running, like your file back-up software and the software for your mouse and keyboard. However, most programs don’t need to run all the time, so you should decide which ones load up and which do not. Here’s how.
For Windows 7 computers, click on the Start button > Startup to see a list of programs that will autoload upon boot up. Right click on the ones you don’t want to autoload and select the Delete option from the menu that appears. Fear not, this does not delete the program from your hard drive, it just takes the program off the list of start up items. You can always load it up manually if you want to use it.
Not all programs that run will appear on this list, though. So you have to delve deeper to find a more extended list of start up programs. This gets a little more technical, but is well worth the time.
For Windows 7, click the Start button and type “run” into the search box (For Windows 8, you just type “run” from the start screen—no box, just type the word). In the window that comes up, type “msconfig” into the Open field and click “Ok.” This will bring up the System Configuration application. Click on the tab that says “Startup” and it will bring up a list of every application that is being loaded on top of Windows.
Look through the list of Startup items and ask yourself the question, “Do I need this program to start every time I run Windows? Or can I just start it up when I need to use it?” Programs such as RealPlayer, Adobe Acrobat, Apple Quicktime will often be in this list even though there is really no need to load them at startup. To remove a program from the startup list, simply uncheck the box next to it. Again, this does not delete the program. It simply stops it from loading automatically. Try to remove everything you don’t need and you may see a big difference in your PC’s performance.
This excerpt appears with the permission of Techlicious.
