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speed up my computer

There are many reasons that your computer slows down over time. This article will hopefully help prevent your computer from slowing down, or even make it faster.

Virus Protection
To start out, make sure you have anti-virus and spy ware protection. I highly recommend Norton Anti-Virus or a good free one is AVG Virus Scan and AdAware SE . Run both virus and spy ware scans at least once a week. (Generally you can set these up to run automatically.)

Disk De-fragment
Another thing you can do is run a Disk De-fragment, basically it will rearrange files and place similar files next to each other. This will come in handy when trying to open files because it knows right where to look. Similar to re-arranging your closet to get more space.

Delete Old Files
Delete your files when you are done with them. All of those files add up over time! Never delete software to your trash can, use the uninstall tool to remove any software on your computer. To get to the uninstall tool click start > control panel > add & remove programs and select the programs you do not use. Make sure you want to delete these off your system because you will not get them back unless you have your original install files or cds.

External Hard Drive
Some other ideas would be to purchase an external hard drive for a low price and a lot of space to store all those mp3, picture, or video files. When files gather up on your hard drive it takes longer for your computer to find the file you are looking for or trying to open. Keep your main drive as clean as possible and if you can move all your media files onto a separate drive. For some good suggestions on external drives visit this article about the western digital 500 gb.

Those are just a few steps that you can take to keep your computer running like the day you got it. I hope you found this article useful!

-notes-

  1. software: programs that are on your computer such as Microsoft word, Internet explorer, and other programs. these files cannot be just put into your trash can. see instructions above for removing software.
  2. files: these are different from software, files like pictures, mp3 songs, video clips, & text documents. these files can be tossed into the trash can if you do not need them anymore.

-Nathan Horstmann / Matthew Schroeder

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Anonymous
Posts: 2
Comment
Good Tips
Reply #2 on : Sat May 05, 2007, 08:22:14
Some really good tips here that seemed to work great for me! Thanks for the great article.
Matthew Schroeder
Posts: 2
Comment
It really works
Reply #1 on : Wed April 11, 2007, 02:27:24
Its always smart to remove any software you are not using. I find that the largest factor in a slow computer though is its media files such as mp3 and video files.