There are many tips for speeding up your PC that are available online. Some of the tips really don’t do much to increase the speed, while others may have a drastic improvement in the performance of your PC.
A PC typically runs fast in its first year or so, but after that time period, its speed begins to slow down. There are a great deal of PCs out there that are only three or four years old, yet run so slow that they are almost unusable. If your PC happens to be this slow, luckily, there are some tips for speeding up your PC that you can employ.
Tips for Speeding Up Your PC
Below are several tips for speeding up your PC that you can follow to increase your system’s performance.
Update The Drivers
One of the best ways you can increase the speed of a PC is by updating its drivers frequently. Typically, a new driver can make a PC speed up considerably. Updating your driver often will ensure that all programs and applications on your computer work well. Therefore, getting an upgraded driver constantly will make your PC faster and much more advanced than a PC that hardly gets its drivers updated.
Reduce the Number of Installed Fonts
Over the years, a PC tends to accumulate an abundance of different fonts that the owner hardly ever uses. While fonts may not seem like much, they make the booting process slower because a PC must load every single font in the font folder. PC owners can easily delete fonts that aren’t system fonts to make their PC run much faster.
Lose the Wallpaper
The use of detailed and very colorful wallpaper slows down your personal computer considerably. Complicated wallpaper tends to slow down your computer due to the graphics card of your PC being overworked. Instead of using pretty wallpaper, use plain or even just white wallpaper instead to improve the performance of your PC.
Free Up Disk Space
Freeing up disk space is a great way for any PC owner to speed up their slow computer. The freeing up of disk space is now easier than ever due to a program called Disk Cleanup that is installed on almost every personal computer. Disk Cleanup removes temporary internet files, empties your recycle bin, deletes installed programs that aren’t used, and also removes temporary Windows files.
Upgrade Your PC
If your computer still isn’t speedy even after trying out many methods that should speed up your PC, you might have to upgrade your PC to the latest operating system. Doing this has helped many PC owners speed up their computer a lot. If even this doesn’t help, it might be time to get a new PC.
Other Tips For Speeding Up Your PC?
Slow PCs frustrate millions of people worldwide every single day. If these people were to use tactics in order to speed up their personal computer, they will likely have an improved computing experience for the rest of their PC’s life. By following the above tips for speeding up your PC, you should see a performance improvement.
20 Comments
Upgrading the hard drive is one of the best option and deleting unnecessary documents. If your pc is more than five years the best thing you can do is buy a new computer.
Defragmentation is also a lot of help to speed up our pc and uninstall unnecessary files or old movies and videos. With updated scan and anti-virus.
Yeah, I agree with the comments above that Ccleaner may help to eliminate those unwanted files that may cause your PC run slow, I use it more often.
I have it automatically run after I close my Web browser. Since I started doing this I haven’t had as many slowdowns or problems with my computer. Most importantly, it removes any termporary files on my computer so it helps it to stay clean.
CCleaner is not the only awesome app from Piriform – they also have a nice defragmentation tool and a file-recovery tool called Recuva which is very easy to use and has saved my bacon quite a few times.
I didn’t know about their defragmentation tool, but I have heard of Recuva, but haven’t tried it. I’ll have to check out the other tools from Piriform.
There is one free software called Ccleaner, which will help you delete unwanted temp files and useless registry settings that can cause your computer slow..
I use CCleaner all the time on my desktop. I usually have it delete unwanted files when I close my browser, and because it runs on a regular basis it only takes seconds to clean my computer. I haven’t had any problems with my desktop since I began using that tool.
@Techie Salsan: CCleaner works quite well and has been one of many tools I rely on to clean up my own PC and countless customer PCs. It is a great tool. It does a really good job of scrubbing the registry too which is yet another area where a computer can hit a brick wall.
All in all, there are some great points both in the articles and the comments.
Twitter: sohologics
This advice article has very mixed good/bad advice. The biggest issues I have.
1) Upgrading operating system rarely makes your computer faster. In fact, generally it makes things slower. Particularly the “upgrade” from XP to Vista made low end systems MUCH slower. High end systems experienced a very modest increase in speed from what I’ve heard, but for your average reader on this site: upgrade operating system and “eyecandy” = downgrade of speed. Exceptions are seen when your current operating system doesn’t fully support your hardware (e.g. trying to run 2 cores on windows 98 or a quad core with some motherboards on XP), and you have to turn off (make unusable) some processors or RAM. Since 98 was never bundled with a multiprocessor architecture, etc, this won’t apply to your average reader. Most of the time your performance takes a significant hit due to RAM requirements (and desires) alone. If you DO choose to “upgrade” operating system, do yourself a favor and buy a lot more RAM (if going from XP to Vista or 7, make sure to have at least 4GB). Also, when you do get to the new operating system, go through online tutorials on how to turn off “effects” and other “eyecandy.”
2) Upgrading drivers doesn’t always or even usually speed up your computer. Usually it’s pretty speed neutral. Often what upgrading drivers will do for you is increase stability or allow you to use your hardware with certain up-and-coming software (read as high-end games). Other driver releases are bug fixes for the last driver release! In any case, I’d advise keeping a copy of the old drivers around and uninstalling the new drivers if things seem to be slower or even less stable. The other thing is drivers are generally downloaded from WindowsUpdate, which has security updates, etc, that typically slow down your computer. But if you DON’T apply those updates, you leave yourself vulnerable to viruses and other attacks. So, apply those anyway (particularly service packs), but keep in mind things might be slower.
One more tip other than the excellent tip to use the disk cleanup utility (which on most Windows Operating Systems can be found by right clicking on a drive in “My Computer” and selecting “clean up” if available or “properties” if not) is to delete a file procmon.pmb from your c:\windows directory (if it exists). This file was recently chewing up over half of my boot disk and all it is is an unneeded bootup log file. One user even reported that it took up 200GB on their disk! Just be careful that you don’t delete other files there at the same time! If you’re not sure if the file is procmon.pmb (vs procmon.sys or procmon.exe), right click on the file and go to properties. If in doubt, have your computer-literate family member do it
I’d also recommend using the disk defragmentation utility from time-to-time (maybe once a month or a few times a year) after a disk cleanup (+deleting procmon.pmb). You can get to this from the properties tab of the hard disk. Set this up to run when you’re not at the computer though, as it will keep trying to restart itself otherwise and slowing down your computer. If you run it semi-frequently, it may take 5 minutes (coffee/smoke break) to run. If you run it infrequently and your disk is big enough and full enough, it may take a couple hours to run (home computer: right before you go to work in the morning. work computer: right before a long meeting or at the end of the day if you can leave your computer on overnight), so plan accordingly.
I am the simple person who does not use anything in my pc, just plain default wallpaper from Vista.
Though I realize my windows sidebar is slowing down my system..
Thanks Uggs.
Great tips to share.. Very helpful..
The best things I do to speed up the PC is delete all the junk that PC have initially installed, reduce the amount of stuff that loads on startup to the absolute essentials, and after a couple years, max out the memory in the system. Works really well for me. All my systems last 4+ years and my laptop that’s 6+ now still runs like new.
Cleaning out the junk from a computer is the first thing I do when I receive one. I was lucky with my desktop in that there was just the operating system installed from the manufacturer.
Yea, that’s really lucky actually. Either computer companies are moving more toward that route, or the increased power of computers makes me realize the junk less now than in previous years. Regardless, it’s incredible how bad it use to be. Years ago, especially with my XP machines, upon purchase, I would just reformat the hard drive and fresh install Windows because it was more efficient for me that way.
It seems that if you don’t want the junk installed in the first place, you would have to build the system yourself, or at least install/reinstall the OS yourself, as you did.
The best way to speed up a PC that I know is to buy a good SSD disk. The hard disk today is the biggest bottleneck of most modern PC. I have a 2 year old Dell Latitude at work that went from a booting time on about 12 min. to under 5 min. after chancing to a SSD disk. It was like getting a new PC.
Twitter: techwork_dk
I have thought about upgrading my hard drive to an SSD, but so far the price has turned me off a bit. I can’t wait until they start becoming standard and having the price drop. I recently say an SSD that uses a PCIe slot instead of an SATA connection. The speed of that hard drive was tremendous – much faster than SSD. The only issue is that 95% of the motherboards don’t support booting from PCIe, or it would have been cool to have.
Now I don’t care much about speeding up my PC or optimize its performance as it often takes a lot of time. I upgrade my laptop each 2 year so that it doesn’t become outdated.
I tend to do a few performance enhancements to all computers that I use. I don’t upgrade as often as you, so I tend to see what I can get out of an older computer.