Frustrated with a slow PC or laptop?
Ready to throw your laptop out the window? Giving death stares to your PC as it slowly warms up in the morning? If you’re about to throw your toys out of the cot in the world’s greatest dummy spit, check out some of our simple options for speeding up your snail-pace PC.
- Switch to SSD
Installing an SSD (Solid State Drive) is one of the best ways to perk up your laptop. You might have to compromise a little on storage space but the extra speed you’ll receive will be worth it. - Upgrade your RAM
A cheaper option than an SSD but still a good option is to upgrade your RAM, add an extra few gigabytes and your computer should speed up a little. - Unclutter your clutter
Sometimes a bit of spring cleaning will help your ailing laptop immensely. Get rid of any unnecessary data, unwanted files and extensions by using a free PC cleaner like CCleaner. - Get rid of unused programs
Got a whole bunch of programs you don’t use taking up valuable space? Or maybe you don’t even know you’ve got these programs sitting in the background? Jump into your control panel and look up your programs. You’ll be able to see which ones you don’t use and you can decide to get rid of them. But be careful to leave programs that your computer’s hardware needs, you’ll know which ones because they’ll have the name of the maker such as Microsoft. - Run a disk defragment
This is a really simple process that will optimise your drives to help your computer run more efficiently. Simply search in Windows for ‘Defragment’ and select the appropriate actions to run the defragmenter. - Run a disk clean up.
You can search for disk clean up in Windows as well and select which drive you want to clean up, another great way of cleaning out the clutter and getting more speed. - Have a spring clean, literally.
Did you know common household dust can affect the airflow around your computer causing it to overheat and even slow down performance? Overheating isn’t good for computers so use your garage compressor or Air-in-a-Can. But be careful with the compressor, too much pressure can damage your hardware, you only need to get rid of the dust, not your motherboard! - Limit your startup programs
If you’ve got a laptop starting up slower than an IT guy on a Sunday without a Red Bull, it might be because of the programs that are scheduled to start up when Windows does. You can easily disable programs that you don’t need to start up straight away by simply using the Search option to search for ‘msconfig’ and using System Configuration to tick off the programs you don’t need to launch automatically. - Down tools
Sometimes you’ll see you might have an unnecessary amount of web browser toolbars, these can cause a slowdown in your PC performance. Some of these come pre-installed on your PC, others come from downloadable applications. In your browser, you can click on View and Toolbars to see your current toolbars and select the ones you want to keep. Also, keep in mind when installing other programs there might be a check box ticked to install a new toolbar, you can simply uncheck this to opt out. - Check for viruses
Viruses can slow down your computer, either get your IT provider to check for you or run your antivirus software program regularly and make sure your software is up to date.
These are simple ways to keep your PC or laptop running in top speed. Of course, we can’t guarantee speed if you’re running a Commodore 64 or a ‘vintage’ PC – there are some things even we can’t speed up!
Have a go at these simple steps to speed up your computer or give us a call to see how we can help.
