Is your PC starting to feel as slow as a snail and taking its sweet time to do even the simplest tasks? You don’t have to put up with a slow PC. Follow these steps to have it working in its prime.
Quick Ways to Speed Up a Slow PC
#1. Restart your computer once a day
Many people who use laptops or PCs put their computer to sleep instead of shutting them down at the end of the day. Some do it because they’re lazy while others do it because booting the PC takes too long.
The big problem with not shutting down is your PC may be still running programs and services in the background that you no longer need. You can blame it on bugs or lazy programming. But instead of worrying about where to put the blame, just shut down your computer once you’re done working or at least restart it when you’re about to have lunch.
#2. Remove unnecessary start-up programs.
Another thing you can do to speed up your computer is to get rid of start-up programs that are not essential. Antivirus and firewall programs are OK, but Skype and other programs have no excuse to start automatically.
#3. Scan for viruses and malware
When was the last time you did a total scan on your PC? Those pesky viruses can run a number of nasty activities in the background, eating valuable memory and CPU resources. Make sure the virus database is up to date before running a scan as new viruses and malware are popping up regularly.
#4. Free up some storage
When storage is running low, it’s normal for the computer to run slower than usual. Sort out the files you frequently need with the ones you need occasionally. Move the later to an external storage or the cloud to free the much-needed storage space.
If you wish to move your data to the cloud, you may want to convert the files first to a more space-friendly format. For instance, convert the large images to WebP instead of JPEG and convert videos to MP4 format. Such A simple move can save storage and bandwidth needs in the long run.
#5. Run disk defragmenter
Running the disk defragmenter is a quick fix to slow computer problems, as fragmented files are a common source of lagging programs and applications. The reason is that most files aren’t saved as one continuous block but in fragments instead. As a result, the harddisk needs to hop from one fragment to another whenever you need to read or write the files.
#6. Add more memory
New programs and operating systems are memory hogs. If your laptop or PC is running out memory space when running a program, the operating system will swap a part of the running program to the harddisk. Since the read/write process to a harddisk is magnitudes slower than the read/write process to memory, you’ll notice severe lag when running resource-hungry programs.
Memories are cheap, but they make a great investment as applications will have all the memory they need to run properly right there in the memory space.
#7. Switch your harddisk with SSD
An SSD is lightning fast compared to a harddisk. Whether it’s reading or writing data, the speed of SSD is simply unmatched by any harddisk configuration. SSD does cost more than a harddisk, but if you can spare the budget, using an SSD will speed up your computer considerably.
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