Speed up your PC.

A friend brought his laptop over and asked me to check it out because it was too slow.
His computer was 5-6 years old and was full of junk, unnecessary start-up items and other resource hungry things.

There are many things that you can do to speed up your PC.
The first thing you need to make sure is that you have a lot of memory, or DRAM, in your PC. The amount of memory is almost more important than the processor (CPU) speed when it comes to speed, because there is an immense amount of data the computer have to load into memory to process. If there is not enough of it than the data will be sent to an actual physical file on the hard disk (swap file) which acts as if it was PC's DRAM memory. The problem is that the file access of the hard disk is much slower than the DRAM in the box. Memory is cheap and easy to install.

Next, check what is loaded into memory when your computer starts up. I find that in most cases your system loads in a lot of programs that you really don't need to reside in memory, taking up precious processing place. Using Start > Run > type in "msconfig" > OK > select "Startup", you will see that a lot of Startup item are checked to be loaded in when the system starts up. Most likely many of them you will not need to load, such as media players, AOL, QuickTime, Java, etc. Just make sure that your virus protection is loaded and the rest you can experiment with.

Defragmenting your drive once every 1-2 months is a good idea. You can use Windows own defrag tool (Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Disk Defragmenter) or download a free program (like Defraggler). This operation can take many hours depending on how much you have on your hard drive, so make sure you start it in the evening before you go to bed and let it rip overnight.

There are a few other things you can do, but starting with these will easy fixes will give your computer a nice speed boost.

Questions? Call or email peter@ligeti.com or 408-528-8422