7 Stunning Tips to Make Your Computer Faster and Smoother

How to Make Your Computer Faster ? With time, every gadget shows the decrease in productivity with the fall in speed, and the personal computers and laptops are one of the most common ones to show the slowing down of speed after a certain time. The quick interface that we see initially when the computer is new, is not the same later on, and we can blame the rough usage, the abundance of installed applications, the filling up of folders and files putting more pressure on the memory for the slowing down.

One of the most common reasons for the slow down would be the ignorance from the beginning, when we feel that the storage space and memory that comes in the new computer would be able to handle anything, but later on it starts showing the problems and we are left clueless on what all led to the frequent freezing of the screen and the apps.

Illustrating the picture above, you must have sometime thought to do so with your PC when it doesn’t responds or hangs at a crucial moment of your work 

An option that the tech newbie would have in mind, is the reinstalling of the OS which might be bringing back the speed of the computer to normal but they don’t know what all would be lost with the reinstall of the complete OS. Here are a few basic tips that a PC user needs to follow to make it run faster and smoother than it does normally 

1. Partition of OS clean and free of garbage

When you are installing the OS in a fresh PC, do keep in mind to create a separate partition for the OS files, and have a separate partition for the other files. The garbage is what you install and that keeps increasing the required storage memory in the OS partition, so you need to keep this partition safe and clean as its the most important part in your PC which is needed clean to make the PC run smoothly.

You can use some tools like TuneUp Utilities to clean your dump files which are unnecessary data’s like Log files, Memory image files, Problem reports, Browser Cache’s and mainly the image previews in windows folders. They sum up a lot of space in your system drive. This tool also automatically cleans your registry errors in the background and makes your computer work super fine.

2. Keep the Desktop Clean

Most of the people including bloggers and even techies keep filling the desktop with the shortcuts and quick files that they feel, might be removing later on and this keeps the desktop cluttered with several files that would be hard to manage later on. There is no necessity to have the application shortcuts on the desktop, as the same can be kept in the start menu and can be accessed from there.

The thing that makes it messy is that many of them think that it looks cool on their desktop of having loads of Files, Applications and Folders. But indeed it’s an inverse impact on your system boot. Whenever you log in to windows it will take much time to load the explorer due to the heavy load of shortcuts and files. Always remember,

Lesser Messy the Desktop = Faster and Quicker Windows will Logon

3. Regular Clean-up of the Browsers

This tip would greatly help the frequent internet and browser users, who browse the web a lot. The web browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome have got the “Clear Cache” option, where all the recent temporary cache and files are removed, and these were the files which were affecting the RAM of the PC. Along with this, if you find no use of the browsing history, it’s advisable to delete the history and the browser cookies from time to time.

Sometimes this has the undesired and a highly confusing result that a recent change appears to be ignored. Due to heavy load of cache you won’t be able to see the newer updates/versions of the sites as it will show you the cache version of their old layout. You will be late while getting the site changeover updates. Clearing the cache might help the browser perform better if it has cached many items which are unlikely to be viewed soon and indirectly will minimize the RAM Usage of your browser which slows down your system like anything.

4. Defragment and Cleanup Regularly

The Windows OS come with the default Disk Defragmenting and Disk Cleanup programs which do the job of organizing the system files and folders and free up the space in the PC. The cleanup tool does quite a few jobs, like freeing the disk space by removing the junk and temporary files, while the defragmentation tool does a complete scan of each file and folder in the system disk drive, and would organize them to free up space which was being used without any actual served purpose.

To Defrag a hard drive, Go to Control Panel > System and Security > Administrative Tools > Defragment your Hard Drive and then  follow the on screen steps.

Visualization of fragmentation and then of Defragmentation – via Wikipedia

Defragmentation your hard disk on a scheduled basis will not only make your computer faster but also will make it healthy and gain the speed of your system. This is also the solution to fix slow computer. The Benefits of Defragmenting a Hard Disk are as follow -

• More Efficient Security
• Faster Applications
• Extended HDD (Hard disk drive) Life
• Reduced Errors
• Quicker Booting

5. Use Antivirus and Update Regularly

The virus, spyware and malware are not always attacking and heavy on the PCs, but many of those would just settle into the file system and remain dormant, which would eat up the space in the memory disk and this is one of the reasons for the slow speed of the PC. The viruses are known to duplicate themselves and this instead would put up more load on the internal system of the computer. Updating the antivirus to the latest version would be helpful in removing any latest virus and malware and keep the PC clean. Always remember, a fast computer is the strongest and completely immune system!

Also Read:

• 5 Extreme Tips to Keep Your Computer Virus Free

6. “Recent” Folder items Need to be Cleaned

The computer has a folder named “Recent” where it automatically creates the shortcuts to all the recently used folders and files, which most of the times are unnecessary. Most of them are directly opened without using the shortcuts, so you need to clean this folder daily so that the memory is cleaned up.

When the list gets filled up with the recent items you opened, it literally slows your start menu activity as they are nothing but list of junk file shortcuts. To erase all the data from the list simply right click on the Recent Items and select Clear recent items list to clean it up. It somehow makes pc faster.

7. Keep it Simple & Silly (Less Animation)

We understand that you want to have a geeky interface and desktop, with the vibrant backgrounds and the animated widgets on the desktop. But many users, who feel that these shortcuts and widgets would increase the productivity, would instead reduce the productivity too. Whenever you minimize the windows to open the desktop, the widgets are loaded and their live updates would eat a lot of memory and it is advised not to use these widgets and keep the desktop clean and free of the live widgets.

The more the simple and clean it will be the more wise and elegant it will look. Take it as an advice that keeping too much of stuffs is not a big deal but keeping the necessary stuffs within a place is the deal as those are the stuffs which you need daily. So clean up your desktop and keep only those applications and shortcuts which are a necessity in your daily life.

You must be thinking that the above desktop’s screenshot is too much hazy and full of widgets and all. But no, it’s a customized version of Windows 8 Consumer Preview and I have very few items which I need in my daily life.

There are several other tips, like adjusting the properties of the computer to put out the best performance, and removing the files regularly from the recycle bin, trying to minimize the installing/uninstalling of the applications etc. but the above basic tips are mostly enough for the speeding up of a slow running PC or laptop which freezes up every few minutes or when a few applications are running at the same time.

Let us know about what steps you take in order to bring back your computer on track. Tip us with your suggestions in the comments below. Cheers!