How to speed up slow Windows PC

I'm a computer technician and people come to me with all sorts of computer related problems and do you know what is the most common complain? My Windows PC runs so damn slow!

There are five main reasons for a slow windows PC and today I'm going to tell you what those five reasons are and how to resolve them and make your windows PC run faster

Reason No.1: Virus Infection

Almost 7 out of 10 windows computers that i come across are infected by computer virus of one sort or another. A computer virus is a computer program that can replicate itself and spread from one computer to another. And if your windows PC is running slow then chances are that it might be infected by virus. Antivirus softwares are expensive but some Antivirus companies offer the home edition of their product free for home usage. Avast is one such product. Home edition of Avast Antivirus is free to use and comes with almost all the features you would expect from a simple Antivirus software.

Okay the first thing to do is download Avast free Antivirus from here
Download Avast
Avast gives you 30 days time period to register the free Antivirus. Registration is simple and of course free. After registration you get a 365 days of license to use it on your PC.
After installing Avast the first thing you should do is update the virus definitions. Once update is completed scan all your drives including your Pen drive and Memory card.

 

Reason No.2: Junk & temporary files

Junk and temp files are by-products of Operating system itself and installed softwares. As the time goes on these junk and temp files keep increasing and they can play a big part in slowing down your Windows PC.

There are plenty of Junk-temp cleaners out there but the best is BleachBit. BleachBit is a cross platform, open source software.

BleachBit can free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk. It also cleans 90 applications including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Adobe Flash, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari,and more. BleachBit includes advanced features such as shredding files to prevent recovery, wiping free disk space to hide traces of files deleted by other applications, and vacuuming Firefox to make it faster. Get BleachBit for Windows from here
Download BleachBit

 

Reason No.3: Windows Registry problems

The Windows Registry is a hierarchical database that stores configuration settings and options on Microsoft Windows operating systems. It contains settings for low-level operating system components as well as the applications running on the platform. The kernel, device drivers, services, SAM, user interface and third party applications all make use of the registry. The registry also provides a means to access counters for profiling system performance. As you go on using Windows you install-remove all sorts of applications and this usage leaves plenty of broken or corrupt Registry entries. Cleaning Windows Registry errors can help make your PC run faster. ToniArts developed EasyCleaner is a very good Registry cleaner.

In fact to call EasyCleaner just Registry cleaner would be injustice to this great freeware as it can also delete all kinds of unnecessary files such as temps and backups. It can search for duplicate files and you can view some interesting info about your disk space usage. With it you can also manage startup programs, invalid shortcuts and add/remove software list. You can get it from here
Download EasyCleaner

 

Reason No.4: File system fragmentation

When the partition is formatted for the file system the partition contains only a few small internal structures and is otherwise one contiguous block of empty space. This means that the allocator algorithm is completely free to place newly created files anywhere on the partition. For some time after creation, files on the file system can be laid out near-optimally. When the operating system and applications are installed or other archives are unpacked, laying out separate files sequentially also means that related files are likely to be positioned close to each other. However, as existing files are deleted new regions of free space are created. When existing files are appended to it is often impossible to resume the write exactly where the file used to end as another file may already be allocated there thus, a new fragment has to be allocated. As time goes on free space as well as frequently appended files tend to fragment more. Shorter regions of free space also mean that the allocator is no longer able to allocate new files contiguously, and has to break them into fragments.

When files consist of many little fragments scattered around the disk the computer needs more mechanical work to read them. Because of that the disk access becomes slower and naturally your Windows PC runs slower. So you need to Defragment your file system. And nothing is better than Ultradefrag when it comes to removing fragmentation.

Ultradefrag is an Open Source Defragmentation tool for the Windows. It can defragment any system files including registry hives and paging file. It can Defrag FAT, exFAT and NTFS file systems.
Get Ultrafefrag from here Download UltraDefrag

 

Reason no.5: Too many start up programs

Many softwares add their entry to the list of programs that auto-start with the Windows. Meaning that they load themselves as you boot Windows and continue to run in the background. They not only make the booting process of Windows slow but also eats away your computer resources such as RAM and CPU. I suggest you to keep Antivirus and Backup programs and remove every other item from the list of start up programs. It's very easy to manage the start up programs with the help of EasyCleaner we looked at earlier.



Run EasyCleaner and in the main window click on 'Startup' this would open 'Startup inspector' window. Here in the main window click on the entry you want to remove and then hit 'delete' at the bottom of the window to remove that entry from the start up list. As i suggested earlier you can safely remove everything from this list apart from Antivirus and Backup programs.

Well it's time for me to say Adiós. If you update Antivirus daily, remove junk files, clean Windows Registry and inspect your start up programs once every week, Defragment your Hard Disk once every month your Windows PC will run lightning fast. Cheers!!!