At some point, your PC may start to feel slow and 'heavy,' especially compared to when it was new...
This is quite a common occurrence, but it can get incredibly frustrating waiting for the PC to boot up or simply load a program.
Fortunately, there are several ways you can do away with this issue and turn your PC back into a high-speed machine. In this article, we’ll go through several that you can do even without extensive technical expertise.
Clear Out the Clutter
Over time, PCs accumulate lots of different items – old downloads, unnecessary registry files, old programs, temporary internet files, and more. These usually take up lots of valuable resources. For example, registry files can easily make your PC slow as the folder is a key part of a PC’s running. Old programs also eat up a lot of space, and most of them usually have background processes that run even when they don’t have “start-up permissions.”
To improve the speed of your PC, take some time and go through your files. Clean up old files that you don’t need, specifically the ones stored in the same partition as the operating system. You can then look at your programs and uninstall the ones you don’t need. This is usually quite effective as it clears both hard disk and RAM space.
If you are not sure where to start, you can consider installing a cleanup tool. It will identify files you don’t need, and you can then choose the ones to clean.
Limit Startup & Background Programs
When your PC starts taking forever to start up, your programs are the first culprits. When you install applications, most of them set themselves to start automatically. This means that when your PC is starting up, the programs will also start up even if they won’t launch when you get to the home screen. Most of these programs don’t really need that permission as you won’t use them immediately or even need them every time.
You can check the programs that start up by going to the task manager. A shortcut for opening the app on PCs is ‘Ctrl + Shift + Esc,’ but you can also open it by right-clicking on the taskbar. Go to the ‘Startup’ tab to look at the programs that have set themselves to startup by default and disable them.
While at the taskbar, you can also look at the background processes under ‘Processes.” These are quite often the culprit for slow PCs, but you can see and close up each. The taskbar displays the percentage of CPU and RAM memory they are using, so it should be easy.
Check for Malware
In some cases, the cause for a slow PC may be something more sinister, like malware. When malware gets access to your PC through whatever means, it starts running background processes meant to expand the malware’s reach in your system or even steal personal data.
This means that you need to continually protect your PC from malware. Start by ensuring that you have a running anti-malware program. It can be as simple as the built-in Windows Defender or a more robust product in the market.
Scan your PC to see if there are any threats. You should also set the anti-malware to scan automatically in the background, either twice or once a week. From there, ensure you stay vigilant by avoiding questionable programs and links.
Upgrade Your Hardware
Optimizing the files and programs will help make your PC faster, but the biggest advantage you can get is from hardware upgrades. While it may sound a bit daunting for most people, it’s actually easy as you don’t need complicated changes to simply increase the speed.
The first thing you need to consider is to increase the size of your RAM (Random Access Memory). Most PCs have an additional slot, and upgrading the size usually increases the speed dramatically. Your programs will load faster, and the PC can also multitask better.
Apart from the RAM, the next consideration would be changing from a hard disk to an SSD (Solid State Drive). These are much faster at storing and reading data, so changing it will also help make your PC faster.
If you are a gamer or you work with graphic-intensive apps, you can also consider upgrading your graphics card. The size generally depends on the requirements of the apps you use, but the latest games require more powerful graphics cards. Making these changes will help reduce frustration by making your PC faster.
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