How to Improve the Performance of Your Windows Computer

By: Shane Zentz

How to Improve the Performance of your Windows Computer.

by Shane Zentz

If you follow the steps contained in this article, your Windows computer should run much quicker and offer much better performance. First you should remove any unused software from your computer. Unused software only takes up hard disk space and can contribute to slow performance. The correct way to remove unused programs from your computer is to use the control panel. From the start menu, open the control panel. Depending on which version of Windows that you are using the options will be different, but there should be a choice within the control panel which says add/remove software, or uninstall programs, or something similar. Most programs can be removed with this option. Simply select the unused or unwanted software program and then click on uninstall and follow the onscreen prompts to correctly remove the software. Repeat this process as necessary for all unused and unwanted software on your computer. Sometimes a program will not allow itself to be removed by the control panel. Your computer may give an error message if you try to uninstall some programs or your computer may crash or hang if you try to uninstall some programs. The best thing to do when this happens is to take note of the name of the software program and then go to "My Computer". From here navigate to the "Program Files" folder. Try to find the folder which contains the program that will not uninstall from the control panel. Try to delete the whole folder (if this is a program which you do not need or want). Most of the time this will do the trick, if not you may have to get more aggressive. If you try to delete the folder but get an error message that will not let you delete the folder, then navigate into the folder and try deleting some (or all) of the folders contents. This method will work with most programs with the exception of some malware which is tougher to remove. If you have a program that refuses to be deleted or changed in any way, then you should do a Google search to find the solution, as this problem is beyond the scope of this article. Remember only to remove programs that you do not want or need and be careful not to remove any important system files or any software that may depend on other software.

Next you should remove any unused and unneeded files from your computer. Many of these files will be in the "My Documents" folder, but some may reside elsewhere. You probably have many files that are unnecessary on your computer that you are unaware of. These files will also contribute to poor performance of your computer. The way to remove these files is to first open the "My Computer" folder and then right-click on your hard disk. From this menu, select "Properties". This will bring up a screen containing information about your hard disk. Under the "General" tab there will be a button which says "Disk Cleanup". Choose this and you may be surprised by how much space you can regain if you delete old setup files, old unnecessary log files, temporary internet files, and other files. You will not generally miss any of these files and the increase in performance will probably be very welcome. Next you should click on the "Tools" tab. From here, to really inprove performance and also help to maintain your hard disk, you can click on "defragment". Defragmenting your hard drive will speed up your computer and also keep your hard disk operating at peak performance. Defragmenting your hard disk can sometimes take a long time, especially if you have a lot of files on your disk. But the wait is usually worth it, you should notice a nice increase in performance and your hard disk should last longer too. Under the tools tab there is also an option to check the hard disk for errors, if you are expierencing very poor performance then you should consider running the full check on your hard disk and let windows fix any errors that it finds.

If your computer is too slow it may not have enough memory. Short of upgrading your memory checking your memory paging settings may help improve performance. Make sure that your paging file is at least equal to the amount of memory in your system. For example, if you have one gigabyte of RAM, the your pagefile should be set to at least one gigabyte as well, and setting it beyond one gigabyte may improve the performance of your computer. After performing all of these steps your computer should perform noticably better and if it does not then you may have a more serious issue, such as a virus or some malware that it slowing your computer down. If all else fails to improve the performance of your computer, there is one last way to improve the performance of your computer. If you have the restore disk that came with your computer you can restore your computer to the original factory settings. On some versions of Windows this operation will wipe out all of your existing files but on other versions of Windows, your files will be migrated to the restored operating system. Just to be safe it is always a good idea to back up all your files to a secondary source (such as a back up external hard disk, flash drive, or a dvd-r or a cd-r) before performing any operation like this. As a last resort restoring your operating system to the factory settings will usually return your computer to its peak possible performance.

About the Author

My name is Shane Zentz and I am an Information Technology Specialist, Computer Programmer, and Web Developer.

(ArticlesBase SC #1697321)

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