Slow Computer

As more and more people jump into the computer industry the need to have computers that are fast is growing every day. Computer maintenance is very important and requires the user to know what is going on within the computer and know what areas they still need the computer for. The uses of our computers can change from month to month depending on each of our individual specific needs. Our demands can range from: business, word processing, the internet, graphic arts, rendering, analyzing, online shopping, school, research, music and entertainment, practically anything. Our needs can be some of these listed or all of them listed which forces major companies and corporations to acknowledge the importance of not having a slow computer. Windows Vista has tried to make all of the steps simpler by allowing schedules where your computer will perform these tasks all by itself on specific times set, so that you the user will not even have to worry about it. Even other programs like Norton 360, a security program for your computer has branched into computer maintenance schedules.

We see some pros and cons with this. First is that we all would love a computer that takes care of itself and has no issues. We don’t need to do anything to it the computer just always works and is as fast as it possibly can be all by itself. It’s a great idea. The reality of it is that with Vista we are getting closer and closer to that but we still don’t have a 100% efficiency yet. Most computers that you get new we have found have schedules set to run at like 3:00am or 5:00am and have had the “or next turn on” option turned off. This is counterproductive to keeping your computer from being a slow computer. This is why as a computer user, it is a good idea to know how to do your own maintenance just to make sure either your computer is taking care of itself or know that you need to run a few scans to keep up on it. We recommend doing the basic steps 1-3 at least every month to two months. After all we need to keep our computer from becoming the all known slow computer we will soon get frustrated with.

One of the major problems that causes a slow computer is that when you install a program that program can be placed into what is caused a start up folder. This folder contains information for the computer to use to when you turn on your computer. It is like a list that tells the computer what programs to get started so that when you go to open one of these programs it opens in a reasonable amount of time. This sounds good but what we seem to see is that too many of these programs get placed into this folder causing an overload of your computers resources which leads to a slow computer. If your computer is struggling anyway and then it has let’s say 15-20 programs to pre-start it is going to take way too much time to compute anything. Lucky for us we have yet another tool built in at our disposal called the startup folder. This is the location where we can clean out these unnecessary programs to prevent them from starting.

Step3: There are a couple of ways to access this specific folder and to remove programs from this startup list. It is important to know that this will not remove the program from your computer it will just remove it from the list the computer uses to pre-start it. We will show you the two easiest ways to do this. For the first way to do this please follow the command:

Click Start – Click All Programs (wait for them to populate) – Find the folder that is called Startup

Ounce you have found this folder you can Right Click the programs in it and click delete. Do this until the Startup folder is empty. If it already says empty that is exactly what we want to see.

The second way to do this is a little bit more involved but it is what most people use when they are optimizing the performance of their computers.

Click Start- in Start Search type in Run – Click on Run – Next to open type msconfig

This will open your system configuration and you can click on the Startup Tab. Now you have a list of the programs that are starting when you turn on your computer. Uncheck the box next to the program so it will not start up when windows starts and click ok. Caution: Again if you do not know what the program does or is do some research before taking it off the list. The good thing is that you cannot do much harm hear. If something is not right you can always go back and undo what you did and re-check the box. This is a great simple way to avoid a slow computer.

Now that we have all of the programs off of our computer that we will not be using, we are one step closer to not having a slow computer. We have a tool that can optimize our computers performance by organization. The defragmenting is a tool that is built into Windows and available for us to utilize. Here is how it works. Basically you can look at your hard drive as a bunch of music CD’s that are stacked. Every time you save something a CD is pulled and that information is placed on that specific CD or space. Now what happens when you remove a program or delete something off of your computer? That CD (or specific space) is pulled again and erased and put back. How does this affect you and cause a slow computer? Well the information that was erased in that particular space on your hard drive leaves a void with surrounding information around it. Your computer has to sort through all of these voids to access the information it needs or save new information when it is requested. This takes time and leads to a slow computer. So what the defragmenting tool does is basically organize your hard drive. It takes all the information that belongs together and lines it up and front loads the next information and so on. It is like if all the CD’s in the stack with information on them, were moved to the top of the stack so that our computer knows where to look to find exactly what it needs. This way it does not have to search through voids and empty partitions to gather all the information. This results in a faster computing process and soon your slow computer will be non-existent.

Step 2: The first thing that we like to do and advice people is that you need to make sure your Recycle Bin is empty. You can do this by clicking on it on your desk top and clicking Empty the Recycle Bin. You will be prompted are you sure you want to permanently delete this and click Yes.
Now you are ready to defragment and put a stop to your slow computer. You can do this by these commands:

Click Start – Computer – *Right Click on Local Disk (C:) – Properties – Click on Tool Tab – Click Defragment Now

This sometimes can take 30 minutes to hours. It just depends on how bad your computer needs to be optimized. Click defragment and let it run.

*Important: Depending on how many hard drives you have on your computer they may be named something different or have another letter (D:), (F:), (G:), ect.