The Top Five Tips On Improving Your Computer Speed Without Spending A Dime

Here are some very useful and easy to implement idea's to turn your computer from the slow, laborious beast it is now into a speedier, faster lean machine.

I present Five easy to implement tips that anyone of any level of computer experience can apply, in addition, there are some extra tips for those who are more of an advanced user and know a little more of what happens 'under the hood' of windows.

Also, take the poll and see at a quick glance if you found this to be of immense help, and also, the tips are FREE! and will not cost a dime.

Defragmentation Of Your Hard Drive - The quickest & simplest way to increase performance for your computer by far is to defragment your hard drive. In alot of cases you may even see a speed boost of up to 20%. The usual though, is a boost of 5-12%.

What is defragmentation? The data on your hard drive is stored in small segments, as time passes, your computer will pick up information and move it about the hard drive as it reads and writes old and new data. This especially happens each time you create new data (install a program, add music, download a group of pictures, etc) So , it will take longer for your computer to work on accessing your data and it spends more time finding what it is looking for. This is called fragmentation.

***Advanced Users***, hopefully this will change if Microsoft ever updates their file system from the very much aging NTFS) Also, don't forget to include your other hard drives, this will help speed up if you use them for backups.

When you perform a defrag, Windows will gather each segment and 'put back together' each of the files in what is called a contiguous manner, which simply means, it attempts to put like files into one section over all the smaller segments. Therefore after a defrag, your computer doesn't spend as much time looking for what it needs to perform.

The end results is your computer will respond much 'snappier', programs will open quicker, and performing tasks just seem to have that little more zip about them.

How To Perform A Defragmentation -

Using Windows Vista as an example (and following the picture on the right. Select your Start Menu Wheel on the bottom left, type in 'defrag' (without the quotations) and the Disk Defragmenter program will appear at the top.

Click the name of 'Disk Defragmenter' once to start the program. Click once on the Defragment Now... button.

Click the check boxes for a green tick, or take away a green tick by clicking it once, to select or deselect which hard drives you wish to perform a defragmentation on. This is only applicable if you have more than one hard drive.

Click on the OK button. Defrag has now commenced. Depending on how long since your last defragmentation process, this may take from several minutes to several hours. So generally doing this before heading to bed of an evening is one way to perform the function. Usually attempting to use the computer whilst it is running may take a longer process.

ALSO SEE TIP NUMBER TWO BEFORE PROCEEDING, NOT ESSENTIAL, BUT HELPFUL

Deletion Of The Recycle Bin And Unwanted Files - This is essentially two mini tips rolled into one as they are both the same as an end result.

Tip 2.1 - Do me a favour, just have a quick glance inside your Recycle Bin (double click on the icon to see it's contents), is it empty? or is it full of files that you have selected for deletion, but never emptied the recycle bin. Go and empty that recycle bin now, simply right click on the icon and select Empty Recycle Bin.

***Advanced Users*** You can set your files for automatic deletion when deleting files, by selecting properties of the recycle bin and changing the settings to automatically delete files, instead of storing these files into the Recycle Bin

Tip 2.2 - Go through your My Computer and have a look at your files listed in the folders;

• Documents
• Downloads
• Video's
• Pictures
• Music

Do you have any files that you can safely delete? Do you have a back up facility or another internal/external harddrive or USB thumbdrive that you can move the files to? If you do, and have saved your files elsewhere, delete them now, remember to perform step 2.1 to FULLY delete them from your computer.

Stop Certain Programs From Starting When Windows Starts - A helpful service, but not entirely essential. See those small icons on the bottom right of the screen? Thats a bunch of programs that are sitting in readiness that are running now, yet sitting there until you choose to use them. Microsoft designed this to save you that extra step of clicking on Start--> All Programs--> Select Program X --> program is now running for you to use.

Helpful if you have certain programs running, like Anti-virus and Instant Messaging programs, but not essential for other programs (like RealPlayer, Java, Quicktime, etc, these will start when the required program or file requests it's use) that can be started later. They will simply just sit there until you use them, otherwise they are using up your precious commodity - RAM or memory. This is essential if you happen to use your computer for movie encoding where each ounce of memory is required.

Again, using Windows Vista as an example (and following the picture on the right. Select your Start Menu Wheel on the bottom left, type in 'msconfig' (without the quotations) and the Microsoft System Configuration Utility will appear at the top.

Click the name of 'msconfig' once to start the program. At the top, you will see you are on the 'General' tab, move your mouse pointer to the right and click once on the 'Startup' tab. You will see a list of programs, again some with green ticks in the check boxes, some without. Those with green start when Windows starts.

To stop a program from starting, simply click on the check box, and when you have no green tick, the next time Windows starts, that program will not start. Click the 'OK' button to complete the process.

***Advanced Users*** Whilst you are in the configuration Utility, you may wish to check or perform some tasks for enabling or / disabling services or to perform tasks in the Tools section for configuring items such as the Event Viewer, System Restore, enable or disable the UAC, etc.

Top Tip No#4 - USE DISK CLEANUP UTILITY TO REMOVE ALL THOSE TEMPORARY FILES

When using your computer, although you may have a lot of RAM inside, a Windows based computer will still use your hard drive as a 'scratch pad'. The reason for this is it's beneficial to for Windows and programs to keep temporary files. This way when the program is used on further occasions, because files are stored on your PC, the program can access those files and then only update any new information that becomes available and it also makes the program feel like it is quick to use. This is most often the case when using a web browser. Often referred to as a 'cache'.

The problem therein lies with once you have finished your tasks, downloading emails, writing inside a Word Document, browsing on Firefox, these programs DO NOT delete any temporary or cache files automatically. But once you start accumulating system restores, Windows & web browser cache files, error reports, temporary picture and text files, and so on, it starts to take up room on your PC.

I have seen some computers used for 2-3 years by customers when I was an 'in-the-field' computer tech, have up to 27 Gigabytes of temporary files and this was on a computer using a 100 Gigabyte hard disk. They didn't know why there computer was so slow, but when I got rid of the clutter, boy they were happy!

Use The Disk Cleanup Utility

All Windows based PC's have this utility from Windows 98 all through to Windows 7, again lets go to the Windows Start wheel, (and following the picture on the right, type in 'disk clean' (without the quotations) and the Microsoft Disk Cleanup Utility will appear at the top.

Click the name of 'Disk Cleanup' once to start the utility. Select the hard drive you want to perform the function on (your C:\ is usually the default drive, which is the one we want) and click on OK. The next screen shows that it will take a few moments for Windows to determine what to remove.

The next screen appears, allowing the user to select or deselect those specific items you want to remove, the following are always safe to select

• Downloaded Program Files
• Temporary Internet Files
• Offline Webpages
• Recycle Bin
• Temporary Files
• Thumbnails
• xxxxx Error Reports

The following are always safe to select, and are optional to deselect if you continue to use specific files within Microsoft Office

• Microsoft Office Temporary Files
• Office Setup Files (if you remove this and later add a Office function you will need to use your CD that came with Office)

When you have selected your items (or deselected) click the OK button, this function may take up to 20 minutes to complete.

***Advanced Users*** You can also select the 'More Options' tab, to remove programs you no longer use and also to remove System Restore files.

Top Tip No#5 - RESET YOUR VIRTUAL MEMORY

Virtual memory is used by windows when it runs out of physical RAM to perform a function. It uses your hard drive as a temporary scratch pad to continue operating. This is a background task and you will never know its operating, until such time as every now and again, since VM is flexible, it still takes time to use, stretch to fit information when needed, and shrink it again when its finished. This can be seen when you are attempting to run several programs at once, and you notice a short slowdown of your computer for up to a few seconds.

Well, the good news is we can stop this happening without hassle from virtual memory, all we do here is simply set it to ONE size and Windows will use that one size irrespective of the function it needs when using virtual memory.

Again, using Windows Vista as an example (and following the picture on the right. Select your Start Menu Wheel on the bottom left, and select 'Control Panel' the top, the control panel window appears. Navigate through the list of icons until you find the 'System' icon (looks like the front of a computer with a white tick in the middle of it's blue screen), double click this.

On the left of the System view, select and click on the 'Advanced System Settings'

In this window, the System Properties, navigate to the 'Advanced' tab and click on it once.

You will notice now, at the top, one reference called 'Performance' with a settings button, click once on this settings button now.

The Performance Options view now appears, click once on the 'Advanced' tab.

At the bottom of the view, you will see the settings for 'virtual memory', click once on the change... button

At the middle of the view, you will see the a radio button for 'custom size', click once on the radio button to select custom size if it currently is not available.

Now in the 'Initial Size (MB)' area, make this number 1.5 times the total amount of physical RAM you have on your PC, so if it is 2 GB, make this 3,072 (remember bits & bytes are in multiples of 8, so 2 Gigabytes is 2048 MB)

Do the same for 'Maximum Size (MB)' area, and also make this 3,072, then click ONCE on the set button, then click OK, click OK, click OK and you are done.

***ADVANCED USERS*** You also have the option of setting your virtual memory page to an alternate partition, second hard drive, or even an external (best if you have SCSI or eSATA) or Network Attached storage device.

Once you have performed ALL of these tips, and it may take some time to do so, please also RESTART your computer.

Also when you have performed Tip#4, you may find initially the first time you start a program again (Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, etc) it may come up quite slower than before, this will happen just once and is a normal event after cleaning out the garbage on a PC.

When I am asked, do I need to spend any money to improve my computer? To make it snappier, larger capacity drives so I can hold more information etc. My answer is depends on your requirements and your budget. But after one has used up all the tips for free, there will come a time that if you want to extend the life cycle of your current PC, there are also low cost options one can pursue, more physical RAM, a larger hard drive, the next version of Windows (upgrading from Vista to version 7 say) all the way through to a brand new box (but keeping existing monitor, mouse/keyboard, printer, etc).

It all comes done to budget and how much one is willing to spend.