Speed Up Your Old Computer With a Tuneup

Now that you are familiar with your computer and you are surfing on the Internet and sending and receiving E-mails with natural ease, maybe it's time to give the old computer a tuneup!  Does it seem to be running a little slower than you remember?  Chances are, it is.  Here are some tricks you can try to help speed things along --for free!--without opening the box to install any new hardware!

1.   Liberate disk space!  Discard unused and duplicate programs or files.  Use an uninstall program to remove all traces of any program you really don't need. (If you delete, you will leave remnants straggling behind)  Back up old word processing or spread sheet or database files to a storage diskette and delete them off the hard drive.  Get rid of clip art and images you don't need regularly.  Delete fonts you never use.  Delete zipped or stuffed files you have already installed.  Then go to the next step.

2.  Defragment the disk. If you have used the machine for several months or more, or create and erase a lot of files, or download, install and uninstall a lot of software, the chances are you can benefit from a defrag.  When files write to the disk, they use continuous blocks of space, if possible.  However, once you delete files, new files can be written in blocks scattered all over the disk.  This wastes processing time.  Look in your System Utilities folder for a defragmentation program, or download a shareware program for this purpose.  Defragmenting moves everything around on the drive and puts all the pieces of programs back together in one place again.  This usually frees up additional disk space in addition to making the processing faster. Run a defrag program weekly to keep the machine purring.

3.   Reduce the number of startup programs. If you have several programs that load automatically when you start the computer, they slow you down and hog precious memory.  Remove everything from your startup folder that you absolutely don't need.  If you only use your browser occasionally, or only check e-mail twice a day, you probably don't need them to open when you boot up.  If you have system utilities or CD volume control or a clock or a program like Get Right download software in your startup tray or folder, you might want to eliminate them and open them from the menu when needed. 

4.  Unplug some plugins.  If you felt compelled to load every possible plugin for your browser, think now about whether you really use them or not.  You probably need some of the standards like Adobe Acrobat, Shockwave, Real Media Player (or NetShow Player), and one of the many 3-D plugins, like Cosmo.  Beyond that, you can probably delete any you don't recognize by name.  Plugins have to load each time the browser fires up and can slow you down.

5.   Uncompress your drive.  If you have used a disk compression program to create more hard disk space, the price you pay is reduced performance.  Consider uncompressing it.  A compacted disk is a slower disk.

6.   Don't fill the hard drive to capacity. Always keep free at least twice as much hard disk space as you have memory.  The system will use that space for swapping if a document you are working with is bigger than your RAM memory can handle. 

7.   Close the window!  Finally, close any programs or windows you are not using for the task at hand.  They are resident in memory and slow down your processing.

Got any other tips for speeding up a laboring computer?  Let me know and I'll do another tip like this one.

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