So you may be like a lot of other people that got a new computer in the last year or two, and now that computer is slow, sluggish, and takes forever to load.  It happens gradually, so you don’t really notice it until you have something to compare it to – like another fast computer!

Here are some steps to take to speed up your computer, most can be done with free software or following simple steps. Some require hardware upgrades.

CLEAN OUT GARBAGE FILES
Windows XP and Vista both get very dirty through constant usage.  Most of the things that you do on your computer create “dirt”.  Email, office apps,  games, and especially surfing the web.  Your computer will collect “dirt” in many different places and in many different ways and all of them impact your computer’s performance.

PC Cleaning BASICS

• Clean out your Web Browser’s cache (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Chrome)
  • Use CCLEANER (here is an article and video on the app) to do this for you.  It will clean out many other garbage files as well!
• Clean out your TEMP files (here is my post on how to do it)
• Empty your Recycle Bin

Run your SPYWARE/MALWARE apps often

Removing Spyware from your pc will speed up your pc significantly.  Click here to learn how to install and run Spyware software.

Defragment your Hard Drive

As you use your computer, the files on your computer change.  They are created, modified, and deleted.  The way Windows works, it saves these file changes but also keeps old versions of the file for recovery purposes. Because of this it has to put file changes on other parts of the hard drive.

The next time you load that particular file, Windows has to search different areas of the hard drive to get all of the fragments of that file.  Now this is a little time time consuming if your file is split up into three or four fragments on your hard drive, but it get’s much worse when your file is in fragmented in HUNDREDS of different places on the hard drive.  The more file fragments, the slower it loads.

How to Defragment your Hard Drive.

• Right Click on the My Computer icon
• Select MANAGE
• When the Computer Management window opens, find Disk Defragmenter in the left pane under STORAGE and click on it.
• In the Right Pane, find the defragment drive button and click.

Following these steps will definitely help your computer operate at much more optimum level, and you should see a nice performance increase if you haven’t run any of these steps before.

We’ll review some more advanced options in the next article.

I was called into a clients office sometime last year to fix a database problem. Now in this situation, I had to disable a pc without shutting it down, so I just got a brown paper bag, wrote DO NOT USE on it and put it over the monitor. I thought it got the point across.

So I was repairing some database components when an employee walked right over, pulled the “do not use” bag off of the monitor, and started running a routine. Well needless to say, I had lost about 3 hours of work (that’s why I bill by the hour).

Because of the nature of the situation, the files that I needed were DELETED and WERE NOT in the Recycle Bin.

Rule #1: Never hit the panic button….NEVER!

Fortunately I had known about a free file recovery program called RECUVA! It’s made by the same folks that make CCLEANER, and it just as easy to use!

What it does is look in the deep recesses of Windows (XP, Vista) and finds the files that have been deleted. Now once you Delete a file and it’s not in the Recycle Bin, that file is typically LOST FOREVER, and Windows can choose to overwrite the data with other files. What RECUVA does is determine if the file you want to recover is able to be recovered.

Now there are other programs that do this, but they are either complicated or you have to pay for them.

This is one of those programs that you never want to have to use, but it’s always nice to know it’s there…so I strongly suggest that you download a copy of this program just for safekeeping!

Have a great day!