How to speed up your computer

Put in as much RAM memory as you can afford

Nothing will speed up your computer as quickly as adding more memory.

Make sure you have at least 10% of your hard drive capacity as free space.

When Windows works it is constantly moving things around. It uses empty space on your hard drive to store things temporarily as it works. If you run low on available hard drive space, Windows will have to move things around more slowly because it does not have as much room as it needs. This is referred to as disk space overhead, and if your hard drive fills up, you run out of overhead, and your computer will stop.

If you have enough disk space, set your virtual memory to twice the size of your physical memory.

If you have 4 GB of memory set your virtual memory minimum and maximum both to 8 GB.

Cleaning out the spy ware and viruses, and reclaiming wasted disk space will speed up your computer.

This is the main reason that a computer slows down. As you travel the internet, people try to set little "hooks" into your computer for various reasons from normal marketing to outright thievery. Getting rid of this "Malware" is essential to speed up your computer. You must use both an anti-virus and an anti-spy ware program. The two threats are different, and there is no one stop solution in the free software world.

Clean the registry:

After you have cleaned out the malware, you need to clean out the registry. This is because malware is not designed to be uninstalled. It has to be pulled out by the "roots". Removing the malware doesn't get the "roots".

Unfortunately malware leaves a lot of broken commands in the registry when it is removed. While these commands can no longer infect your computer, Windows will still dutifully read and try to execute each command. Many times it will wait a certain amount of time for a response before going to the next command. This slows your machine down considerably. When you clean the registry you will speed up your computer

The problem with cleaning the registry is not a do-it-yourself deal. Heck, I've been doing this for over 35 years and it is not even a do-it-MYSELF deal. Messing with the registry on a Windows computer is equivalent to brain surgery. Do something wrong, and you will be reloading Windows. I use a registry cleaner. When you get a registry cleaner, make sure it is a quality product. I personally recommend RegCure PC Optimizer to my customers. Use what you want, but look for a product with some credentials and awards to their credit.

Update Windows after you have the registry straightened out.

Make sure you have your computer up to date with Windows updates. Just enable "Automatic Updates" and let it load the updates.

DEFRAG your computer-

As you use your computer the files on your computer are constantly being loaded into memory and rewritten to the disk. Data is stored on a disk in whatever available space that can be found on the disk. So a movie may have a few minutes at he beginning of disk platter 1, another section on patter 2 3 and 4. These files are written into the drive in chunks, called "fragments", and Windows simply keeps up with where the fragments are, and what order they belong. A single file may have thousands of fragments.
At first, data written to the hard drive can be written in a continuous stream, and the computer can read from the front of the file to the end. As your computer manipulates the files, the larger sections of unused disk space get used up, and the computer starts storing the data in smaller fragments, but in more places. At a certain point the data files are scattered all over the place and Windows has to go gather up all the fragments to make the data available.
What defragging (for defragmenting) does is to take all the smaller pieces and rearrange them back into a continuous file again. Then Windows can go back to reading straight from the beginning through to the end of the file without having to gather all the scattered parts. This helps speed up your computer too.
To do this, Windows moves part of the files onto unused disk space, then rewrites the information back in a continuous stream.Defragging your computer can take a LONG time unless you do it on a regular basis. I do it once a month to help me keep my speed up.

Computer drivers need to be kept updated:

Drivers are the interpreters that allow the various components of a computer to talk to each other. This is handled through something called an "Application Programming Interface", or API. Each component must pass their data to the API for all other devices to understand it.
The software that takes the raw component data and applies it properly to the API is called a driver because it drives the data from the component to the API.
When your drivers are out of date, the API will have a hard time processing all the information it gets, and will ask for information it does not understand to be resent from the component because it thinks the data was corrupted. This request will fail a few times before the API drops it and moves on. Stopping this will speed up computer.
Again, be sure to get a quality driver updating package if you do not know how to ferret out updated drivers for yourself. I recommend.

A few more tricks to speed up your computer

Blow the dust out of your processor:

If your computer processor gets hot, your computer will slow down, start to hang up, and even shut itself off. You need to keep the processor fan clean of debris, as this will cause the CPU to get hot.
Open your computer and look for a fan on top of a silver block of fins. This is the processor. The fins are a heat dissipaters (called a heat sink), and the fan blows air down into the fins to remove heat. Dust will build up under the fan blades, blocks the wind AND acts like a blanket to the heat sink, and your processor will get hot. Get a can of compressed air and clean this debris out.

Blow the dust out of your video card:

If you have a video card with a fan mounted on it, the same rules apply.
Remember that keeping everything up to date will help keep your PC speed up. Computer technology changes so often that this is a vital part of PC maintenance, and will go a long way to speed up your computer.

Speed up your computer with these easy steps.

How to speed up your computer