Have you ever wanted to toss your computer out the window because it was so slow? You probably have. You’ve also probably yelled at your computer for being slower than a snail. What you’re doing is actually what many computer users, myself included, feel like doing whenever their computer starts to slow down, or even worse, hang on them. All of us have experienced this – it’s a fact of life that sooner or later your computer is going to frustrate you one way or another – most often, it will become slow. Maybe you’ve come here out of desperation to find out how to make your computer run faster.  Worry no more, eTechPlanet is here to save the day. We’re here to give you some tips that will help you make your computer run faster. Read on to find out more.

End processes that you don’t need:

99% of the time, as we go around doing what we do on the computer, there are unnecessary processes running in the background. Silently, they take up system resources such as RAM. Thus, they reduce your computer’s performance. The thing is, you’re not even using those processes, so why leave them running?

In this case, I don’t need LifeChat.exe so I’m going to end this process.

There we go. All set and done. You may only be freeing a bit of memory, but the more processes you end, the more memory is freed up, and the faster your computer will get.

Disable Windows Aero:

This assumes you are running Windows Vista or Windows 7. If you are not running Windows 7 or Windows Vista, ignore this section. Now, as many of you know, Windows 7 and Windows Vista come with transparency and other visual effects, in a package called Windows Aero. Windows Aero may look pretty, but unfortunately, as is the case with most things that make Windows look prettier, it reduces performance. It takes up more resources with every window you open.

Windows Aero is controlled by a service called the Desktop Window Manager. If this service is disabled, Windows Aero will not be able to run. But how do we stop this service? It’s simple. Open up the Windows command line, and type “net stop uxsms”. This will immediately stop the Desktop Window Manager service. What if you want to disable the service at startup? Open services.msc, find Desktop Window Manager, right click it and click on properties. Then set “startup type” to “disabled”.

A side tip if you are an XP user: Use the Windows Classic theme instead of the default Luna theme.

Scan your computer for viruses and spyware:

Viruses and spyware are nasty things indeed. Not only do they harm your computer or steal your personal information, they definitely reduce your computer’s performance as well. If your computer is running very slowly, this could be the result of a virus infection. Bring out the antivirus, and scan your computer.  If you don’t have an antivirus program, either download avast! Free anti-virus or use Trend Micro HouseCall online scanner. We suggest you get an anti-virus program that needs to be paid for, but we’ll touch more on the subject of antivirus later.

You may also want to use programs such as Ad-Aware which detect malware, which can also cause your computer’s performance to decrease. You’ll be surprised about how much faster your computer will run when your computer is free of all those malware and viruses.

Defragment your hard drive:

After a while, your hard drive will become fragmented. What does that mean? When your hard drive becomes fragmented, it means that your hard drive is unable to lay out related data sequentially, resulting in more time needed for the hard drive to read data. That’s going to cause computer performance to be reduced. The performance hit depends on the degree of fragmentation – usually, the older the hard drive, the higher the degree of fragmentation. As the hard drive ages, it gets more and more fragmented, until one day your computer gets so slow, you pull out a gun, and….

Don’t let that happen to your computer. You can defragment your hard drive so that data will be laid out sequentially again, and thus can be read faster. Windows comes in with a built-in defragmentation program, but we recommend that you get another defragmenter such as UltimateDefrag by DiskTrix. You’ll be surprised at how fragmented your hard drive can get after years of usage, and the speed boost you get after defragmenting. You’ll probably be kicking yourself after that, thinking to yourself, “why didn’t I do this earlier?”

Reformat your computer:

It is a well-known fact that a freshly installed operating system is going to perform better than an operating system that has been used for ages. The reasons for this are many – its beyond the scope of this article. But anyone with common sense would know that.

We’re not asking you to reformat your computer every month or every day – we don’t know of anyone crazy (or desperate) enough to do that. After a period of time, say after a year, you should format your computer and start fresh. Sure, it can be troublesome with you having to take backups and all that, but trust us, it’s worth it.

Upgrade system components:

This should only be done as a last resort. If you’ve tried all of the above steps to no avail, perhaps it’s time to upgrade your system components. The most common upgraded component is the RAM. It may be worth it to get more RAM if your computer is sluggish. You first need to check if your motherboard supports DDR1, DDR2 or DDR3 RAM though – you don’t want to end up getting the wrong type of RAM. DDR2 and DDR3 are higher performing than DDR1. Most motherboards support DDR2 and most new computers support DDR3, but check just in case. Get the fastest RAM you can.

Final words:
We have touched on common, yet effective ways to speed up your computer. Of course these are not the only ways to speed up your computer. There are other methods, such as overclocking, but you run the risk of instability when overclocking your CPU. These tips will work for pretty much every case. If your computer is an old one however, it may be time to get a new computer – we’ll be touching on that in another article. So, as you can see, making your computer faster is really very simple. It’s just that most people don’t know it.