Slow computer? 10 Ways to Make it Run faster

Many people will be planning on upgrading their laptop or PC this Christmas, but here are 10 ways of avoiding a costly new purchase

1) Uninstall unused programs

New PCs come with a whole load of programs you will never use, and you probably don’t even know they exist.

Some programs even run background processes when you load your computer, even though you are not using them.

To remove all these pointless programs, open the Control Panel’s Programs and Features page, and have a trawl through the list of installed software. Uninstall those that you do not need, while being careful to leave programs your computer’s hardware needs (typically their publisher will be listed as the PC maker’s name or as Microsoft).

If you are still unsure about which programs to use, try a third-party called such as PC Decrapifier – it’s free for non-commercial use – which should tell you which programs you don’t want or need.

2) Automatically delete temporary files

Temporary files amass on your computer through everyday tasks and can remain on your hard disk, slowing the computer down. Getting rid of these files, including your internet history and cookies, should give you a larger amount of hard disk space, speeding up your PC.

To do this, open “My Computer”, and select your local drive (usually C:\). Select the “Windows” folder and then open the folder titled “Temp”.

Use your mouse to right-click on the folder, and in the “View” options, choose “Details”. Once this is done, select all the files that are older than the current date and press the delete key. Then go to the Recycle Bin on your desktop and empty it.

3) Install a solid state drive

Hard drives are the biggest cause of slow speeds and especially slow startup speeds on your PC.

While they are not cheap, installing a solid state drive, which have extremely fast read times, can speed up your startup considerably.

4) More hard drive storage

Even if you make sure to regularly clean out all your temporarily files, if your hard drive becomes 85 per cent full, it’s going to affect your computer’s speed.

If you regularly film videos or use your PC for recording television, then you will want as big a hard drive as you can get, upwards of 1TB in size.

Here is a handy video on how to install your new hard drive.

5) Prevent unnecessary start ups

This method will primarily affect how long it takes for your laptop or PC to startup, but often many of the programs which are launched on startup continue to run and use up your computer’s memory.

To do this, click “Start” and “Run”. In “Run”, type “msconfig” and then press enter. You should then see the “Startup” tab, with all the programs ticked the ones which will load upon your computer starting up. There is a good chance the list will contain a number of programs you might not have realised were running on your computer during startup, or even at all.

You can either manually deselect those which you do not want to load, or click “Disable All” and then select those you want to run, such as particularly important programs like anti-virus software.

Another trick can be removing all the unnecessary fonts Windows loads. Windows 7 loads more than 200 fonts on startup which can slow down the speed at which it boots up. Go to the Start Menu’s search box, search for the Fonts folder and check off all the fonts you don’t need, and click the “Hide” button in the toolbar.

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