Wednesday, December 23, 2009

The Simple Things I Did To Speed up My Computer

By Travis Van Slooten

I recently noticed my computer was sluggish and producing errors. I'm going to tell you the simple things I did to help speed up my computer with the help of a registry cleaner. Before I get into the specific tasks, I want to explain what the registry is. Within your computer system, the registry is a catalogue of sorts that the operating system accesses every time an action is performed. For example, when I run Microsoft Windows, the computer searches through the registry for files to open and run the program. Because I constantly install/uninstall programs for my home business, extraneous files are left within the registry causing my computer to run slowly. In fact, I started to receive various error messages that caused not only frustration, but it also was wreaking havoc on my work.

Before you even consider altering or cleaning any part of your computer, you need to backup your data. While there is a very small risk of losing data when you are just doing simple cleaning, there is no reason to put your important information at risk. If you don't have a backup drive, you can always sign up with one of the many web-based companies who will store your information for only a few dollars a month.

The first thing I did to speed up my computer was I purchased a registry cleaner. I avoided downloading a free one in fear that it wouldn't work properly, or I wouldn't have access to updates. I don't have time to mess around with poorly developed software. The registry cleaner performed a disk cleanup which deleted those extra files within the registry. Now my computer doesn't have to read invalid files to get to what I am commanding it to do.

After you run a cleaner, you'll want to run a couple programs that are so important Microsoft included them with every copy of Windows. Scan disk and drive defrag are both found under system tools and can dramatically improve the speed of your computer. They basically find errors on your drives that may be causing problems and then restructure your files so they load more quickly. The programs essentially run themselves, but since they may take a while, you should consider starting them at night before you go to bed.

Something many people overlook is the additional network drives connecting them to other computers. Whenever your computer loads it has to scan all drives, including network drives, and that can take time. By disconnecting unnecessary network drives, you'll greatly speed up load time.

You may have a big problem with the initial startup of your computer. If it takes more than a minute for you to get from power on to your desktop, you should strongly consider examining your startup programs. Many sneaky programs add themselves to your startup menu when you run them. Music apps, chat programs and other similar software might be hogging a lot of your memory upon startup.

Most of these steps are free and all of them are easy to do. It doesn't take a professional to get your computer running back at top speed. It just requires you to roll up your sleeves and do a little cleaning. I followed all of these steps when I chose to speed up my computer and the difference has completely eliminated my frustrations and aggravations from having a sluggish PC.

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