Tips for speeding up and tuning up your computer - Part 1

A lot of people complain that their computer is so slow doing some seemingly simple task. There are a lot of things that you can do to help speed up a computer, but there are some things that will just not help no matter what you are doing. In this article I hope to be able to give you some good places to start off figuring out how to help speed things up. Such as checking your computer to make sure it doesn't have a virus, checking the drive to make sure it is working properly, and then finally would be to run some utilizes on it to increase the speed, remove junk and see if you need to upgrade.

Whatever is making your computer slow, here are a few things to check on which we will go into in more detail.

See How to care for a PC for tips on how to do the following,

• Make sure it is Clean
  
• Run a Virus Scan
• Disconnect it from the internet/network
• Check your system

The first thing to do is to make sure that it is not infected with a virus of any kind. A lot of computers that seem to be running slow are because it is most likely infected with multiple viruses. If you've had strange popup warnings, have not kept your computer up to date, and are running no anti-virus of any kind then you are most likely infected. This will slow you down greatly. However sometimes virus protection programs (Anti-virus) software can slow your computer down especially when you first turn it on. Usually this is because they run a scan when your computer starts, any time you access a program, or any time you access a file. Which is good. Run a scan, if you run one of the major anti-virus programs and it comes up clean, then you are probably alright. If it is a bad infection a lot of new viruses trick you into believing your PC is protected. However, if you feel a little insecure you can try an online scan like House Call for a sanity check and second opinion.

If it isn't a virus then determining the cause can be tricky as most computers these days are connect in one way or another to the internet, or a larger network. This can cause quite a few different problems that look to be rather inexplicable in terms of slowing your computer down. The act of opening up a word document which you would think shouldn't cause your computer to slow down can. The word document itself could contain links back to websites that are out on the internet, or it could be checking back with Microsoft to make sure it has an appropirate update or template. So disconnect your computer from the network, unplug it from the telephone line, and then repeat the issue that you think is slowing you down. On corporate networks for example people often think that the computer is so slow when in fact, a combination of things are occurring. They're trying to get a file from the network, so that takes some time, and on top of that the anti-virus has to scan it. So it is going to slow you down. So disconnect yourself first.

Finally check your system. I've gone over in some of my previous posts about how to keep your computer clean. Keeping it clean is very important. Overheating can cause it to slow down considerably not to mention physically damage it. However I want to focus more on some of the things you can do on the computer that will hopefully speed things up in part 2.

In part two we will go over a few software tools, tips, and techniques in detail to help speed up the computer.