I’ve spent the better part of my week staring at my laptop watching it perform the simplest tasks over a long period of time. There was a pint where it felt like loading a page was taking an hour though I’m sure it was only 2minutes at most. My laptop has been running sallow and I’m getting tempted to bang it against a wall out of frustration.
As a blogger, having your machine run slow is nerve wrecking. There are too many things to do and a slow machine just won’t cut it. I’ve discovered a few ways to speed things up and decided to share them in the hopes of helping someone out there.
Check your hard disk space
Having your hard disk at almost full capacity contributes to the speed of the machine. The more you store on the hard disk, the slower the machine gets. I’ve been told by my techie friends that I should keep about 15-20% of the hard disk space free at all times. This will help the machine run smoothly and my bouts of staring into space will come to an end.
You can check the disk usage on your hard disk by going to My Computer, right-click on Hard Drive, and go to Properties. If the disk is almost full, make a point of deleting what is unnecessary. I tried this and it was instant relief!
Run a disk defragmenter
A disk defragmenter is a tool within your operating system that reorganizes your files on your hard disk in systematic order, which reduces access time per request.A disk defragmenter can be scheduled to run at-least once a month or even weekly if you save and delete many files on a regular basis.
Get rid of the unnecessary programs
I tend to listen too much to the hype about programs and how awesome they are in my work. This is however coming to an end. No more downloading programs that only fill up space and are used once in a while. It doesn’t matter how awesome the graphics look. If I don’t use it on a regular basis, it’s going straight to the recycle bin. I would advise you to do the same. Go through the machine and see what programs you have and only leave those that are absolutely necessary on the machine.
Reduce programs that load at start-up
When you have many programs loading up as soon as your computer starts, you give your computer many tasks to handle at the same time.All those tasks share processor time and memory with your most important applications, which can greatly slow everything down.Once in a while if you are in the middle of a task and your computer is slow, you can kill some processes by going to the task manager, locate a process that is unnecessary, select i it and click stop process.
Increase your computers Random Access Memory (RAM)
All programs are loaded to your computers random access memory before they are executed.When your memory is full, your computer uses some of your hard disk to create a page file that store some active processes. when this happens, access to those processes is really slow because hard disks are very very slow in speed as compared to random access memory.
Install an anti-virus program, spyware scanner, and an anti-malware
Machines tend to run slower when they have bugs and viruses. It’s always advisable to have antivirus and anti-malware programs.
The fewer bugs, viruses, and bits of adware your computer has to manage, the more time it will have to devote to other processes. While you’re at it, make a point of keeping Windows up-to-date.
Hope this helps you in your bid to have less irritating scenarios that make you wanna break your computer