4 Ways to Improve Your Computer's Speed

Despite coming from a fresh restart, your computer is taking forever to open new programs. Or worse, your desktop loads too slowly, so you can't use it immediately. What should you do in order to resolve this issue? To improve your computer's speed, you can do the following steps below.

1. Remove unnecessary programs.

You may notice that your computer is pre-installed with programs from either the developer of your operating system or the manufacturer of your machine. These programs take up unnecessary storage space from your hard drives. And more often than not, these programs silently run in your system without you knowing about them. Thus, they use up a large portion of your random-access memory (RAM), which in turn slows down the performance of your computer.

How can you uninstall a program? If you're running a Windows 7 OS, click the Windows button located on the lower left side of your desktop. Afterwards, open the Control Panel and look for Programs and Features. Finally, select the program then click Uninstall.

Before removing such programs, make sure that you determine that it is safe to remove. You may contact technical support if you are unsure if a certain program can be deleted without harming your system. There are also third-party programs available on the internet that can detect if a program is necessary to your system or not.

2. Remove temporary files.

You want to free up more space in your device to optimize its speed. Therefore, you should delete the temporary files in your system. These are automatically saved by your computer upon your use of programs. By saving temporary data, your computer can easily reload the file or program by just fetching its data from the temporary files folder.

However, your PC doesn't immediately delete its temporary data even if you do a shutdown. As such, you should manually remove these unnecessary files. To do this, open the My Computer first. Afterwards, open the Local Disk (Drive C) and double-click the Windows folder. Inside it is the Temp folder, which contains all the temporary files in your computer. Simply delete everything in that folder.

3. Run the disk cleanup and disk defragmentation utilities.

The Windows operating system has built-in programs for disk cleanup and disk defragmentation. When you run the Disk Cleanup, or cleanmgr.exe, it analyzes your hard drive and suggests the removal of unnecessary components such as the contents of your recycle bin. It also compresses the old files in your system to reduce their memory usage.

On the other hand, the Disk Defragmenter, or dfrui.exe, improves your system's efficiency by rearranging your data storage in a contiguous manner. Through this, your PC can easily retrieve the data for your files and programs. In turn, this will increase the speed of your computer.

To access these utilities, simply open Run and type the name of the program. Lastly, click OK to initiate the tool.

4. Get more storage.

If you have done the above steps and yet the problem still persists, then it may be best to increase your computer's memory. Most people store files in their hard drives without knowing the full consequences of their actions. The more data you store in your system, the longer time it takes for the computer to do its job. As such, you should minimize using your hard drive to store personal data.

If you usually store all your pictures and videos in your PC, the chances are your hard drive may be almost full. If you access "My Computer", there is a bar indicator under the drive name to indicate the utilized storage space. A red bar signifies that your drive is almost full and it may be fitting to transfer your personal files to another storage device, such as an external drive. It is recommended that you get at least 1 TB storage, especially if you will store media files, such as videos, which could come in up to hundreds of megabytes in size.

Likewise, you can expand the random-access memory of your system. You may add a memory stick in case there is still slot in your motherboard. Otherwise, you should replace your RAM altogether. How will you know if you need an extra RAM? If your system usually freezes or hangs up by just running a program or two, then by all means, expand your RAM.

You don't need to endure waiting for your slow computer to finish its tasks. By doing these tips, you should be able to use your device without the delays.