6 Steps To Speed Up Your Computer's Performance

We live in a fast-changing world, always looking for the fastest way to get things done. You hardly have time to wait for burgers, fresh coffee, and microwave popcorn at your local fast-food joint. So who has time to wait for a slow computer? Besides adding more RAM to your computer, there are six steps you can take to speed up your computer's performance. Most of these steps are applications, so they can speed up your computer for free.

We live in a fast-paced world and are always looking for the fastest way to get things done. You rarely have time to wait for a burger at your local fast food joint, a cup of freshly brewed coffee, or popcorn in the microwave.

Besides adding more RAM to your computer, there are six steps you can take to speed up your computer's performance. Most of these steps are applications that are already installed on your computer, so you can speed up your computer for free.

One of the first steps to take is to empty the Recycle Bin. It's easy to do. Hover over the Trash icon on your desktop, right-click and select Empty Trash.

Next, open Internet Explorer and go to Tools, Internet Options. Click Delete Cookies, then click Delete Files. In the window that appears, check Delete all offline content and click OK. Then click OK to close the Internet Options window and close Internet Explorer.

These two steps are the quickest and easiest. Then run Disk Cleanup. To do this, click Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, and Disk Cleanup. The Disk Cleanup feature will start calculating how much disk space you can free up. Once done, you will see a list of files to delete. There should already be some files checked, go through the list and check the files you want to remove, and click OK.

Now run disk defragmentation. This can be a long process, so you should set this up while you are doing other things. For example, set it up and then watch your favorite TV show, mow the lawn, or go to the gym. You have an idea To get started, go to Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Defragmenter. Click Analyze. If you're lucky, you'll get a "You don't need to defragment this volume" notification, but in most cases, you'll have to click "defragment". If so, click it, do something else, and come back in an hour or two.

Once that's done, run a spyware scan. Most people are unaware that they can be easily infected with spyware, so regular scans are highly recommended. You can use any antispyware program. Note that no program will remove everything. To be safe, you should run at least 3 different programs. What you find may surprise you. You may have spyware running on your computer and you may not even be aware of it. Once the scan is complete and all spyware is removed, proceed to the final step.

In this last step, an antivirus scan is performed. I hope you have an antivirus program installed on your computer. If not, I highly recommend getting it as soon as possible. Once your antivirus is set up, go ahead and run it. This can take anywhere from 20 minutes to several hours, depending on how many files you have on your hard drive. Set it up again, then do something else. Please come back in about an hour.

Once all steps are completed. Restart your computer and you will be amazed at how light it is. We recommend doing these six steps at least once a week (you can even set some steps to run automatically). This will make your computer run much like it did when you first bought it.