Austin Lane

When you are working at your computer do you ever have to sit and wait for the computer to respond? Does it seem like no matter what you do, it takes forever for your computer to respond. Keep reading for steps that you can take to speed up your sluggish PC.There are a couple of things that you need to find out before you have someone perform the following tasks on your PC. You would need to know what processor you have in your computer, how much memory you have, and the memory type. This information and more can be gathered by a good tool from Lavalys called Everest Ultimate Edition.

1. Add more memory. — Adding memory to a PC can make a huge improvement in performance. At this point in time, for PCs running Windows XP Professional should have a minimum of 512MB of RAM and we would recommend at least 1GB. PCs that only have 128MB of RAM will show the most benefit from additional memory.
2. Remove Viruses and Trojans — Most computer users are aware of what Viruses are, but do you realize that many times you can be completely unaware that your computer is infected. You should have a good antivirus solution installed on your PC such as Symantec’s Norton Antivirus. Also, ensure that the full system scan is not scheduled to scan while you will be using your PC, as it will also slow your PC.
3. Remove Adware and Spyware — These are those fun programs that you download and install that may or may not have some benefit to you, but will definitely display advertisements and possibly steal your data. Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware 2007 will help clean infections.
4. Uninstall unused programs — When you install software on your system, the new programs may or may not automatically run when you login to your computer. One way to ensure that they do not affect performance is to uninstall any software that is not essential. Be careful not to uninstall software that you need.
5. Defragment your hard drive — When Windows saves files to your computer, it looks for the first unused space on the hard drive. If one of your files is later modified, it can be split between two or more locations on your hard disk. The Windows Defragment Tool will move the files around on your hard disk so that the data stored for each file is stored contiguously.
6. Archive old Email — For users that utilize Outlook, or another PC-based email client, you can quickly gather a large amount of email. This email can slow the performance in Outlook to the point that there is a noticable delays in navigating between folders and opening emails. Be sure to delete unneeded email, and archive old email that you need to keep. Make sure this archived copy is stored somewhere that is backed up.
7. Disable XP’s Fancy Themes — One of the features that Microsoft introduced with Windows XP is their new themes. These themes require additional processing power to be displayed. You can disable the new Windows XP look and feel and gain a slight performance boost.
8. Disable unused services — By default on most new Windows XP computers, there are several services, or programs that are always running that are never utilized. One such service is the Windows Zero Configuration service, which is responsible for allowing users to easily connect to wireless access points. This is a necessary service to have running if you are utilizing wireless networks, but if you are using a desktop PC that uses a wired network card, this is completely unneccessary, so you can disable it.
9. Clean Registry — There are software packages out there that claim to clean your registry of extra entries and wrong entries. I would only utilize the one found at http://safety.live.com, which is Microsoft’s online security and tune-up service.
10. Buy a new PC — The ultimate way to get quicker responses from your PC is to buy a new one. When discarding your old one, be sure to have it recycled so that it doesn’t add to the waste at our landfills.

These are a few things you can do to increase your computer’s performance. If you need help implementing anything above, please contact Austin Lane Technologies, Inc.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 12:17 am and is filed under Email, Internet, Jeff's Tech Tip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.