Computer running slow ? top 5 tips

Here’s what I recommend

  1. Empty your trash. To do this, right-click on the Recycle Bin on your desktop and then choose Empty Recycle Bin.
  2. Clean out your cookies and temporary internet files.
  3. Tell Internet Explorer not to store so many Temporary Internet Files. Go into Tools > Internet Options and you should be in the General tab. In the Temporary Internet Files section (in the middle), click on Settings. At the bottom, you’ll see a section entitled “Amount of disk space to use”. I recommend resetting this to 50 megabytes.
  4. Tell Internet Explorer to delete all temporary internet files each time it closes. To do this, go to Tools > Internet Options and then click on the Advanced tab. Scroll to near the bottom under the Security area. Here, look for “Empty Temporary Internet Files when browser is closed”. Put a checkbox next to this. Then click Apply and OK.
  5. Remove unnecessary files from the System Tray, remember, every program that automatically loads into memory upon startup will take resources – slower bootup times, less ressources, less CPU availability.Warning – this may affect your system – so baby steps!Note! You won’t be deleting these files, just preventing them from loading into memory at startup. But please be careful and only remove those that you’re sure you don’t need. To do this, go to Start and click on Run. In the text box, type in “msconfig” (without the quotes). Then go to the Startup tab and uncheck what you want to uncheck. After you are done, hit Apply then OK. I removed things such as iTunesHelper and various programs that load into memory that I don’t need to have there (now they won’t load into memory until I manually open the programs).
  6. Assuming you may still have some slowdowns, use Task Manager to help speed up your programs. This was a golden fix for me. Open up Task Manager by hitting CTRL-ALT-DEL at the same time followed by selecting Task Manager in the window that pops up. Click on Processes. There will likely be so many that you’ll want to sort by “Mem Usage” (click on “Mem Usage” and then click on it again to sort by memory required in descending order). To set a priority, right-click on the program of interest, then go to Set Priority, then set an appropriate priority (I recommend “high”). From time to time, my Internet Explorer or Outlook turns to a crawl. This is the method I use to fix that.
  7. Control the number of icons on your desktop. If you have 40 icons on your desktop, then your PC has to refresh 40 icons every time any part of the desktop is showing. This can slow things down. For those icons that don’t need to be on the desktop, create a folder (right-click on desktop then choose New > Folder). Then open the folder and move some of the icons to this folder.
  8. If you use Google Web Accelerator and web pages are loading much slower than normal, turn off Google Web Accelerator. Sometimes I think Google’s servers are working slowly. Either that, or something with their local software gets in a funk and becomes useless and a hindrance.

 

Regards, The team at NotebooksRUs and Melbournes Best IT Services team at Applied-IT

kudos to Squirrelnet.com for some of the tips :)