Is your computer driving you crazy today? After all that you have read about how quick computers are supposed to be are you constantly frustrated by the fact that it cannot even keep up with you? If you can relate to these things here are a few easy tricks you can use to make your computer run faster.

Here are five quick things that you can do easily to make your computer faster. They do not cost you any money. These are frequently the first things that the guy at the computer shop down the street would do if you ask him to make your computer faster. The big difference is that he would charge you $100 to do these things. You can do them for free.

If you have been using your computer for six to 12 months or even longer than the first thing you should do is locate the defragmentation program that came along with your computer. This is a built in program that you should run on a regular basis in order to make it easier for your hard drive to perform well. It will take the pieces of files that have been broken up and stored in a variety of locations or your hard drive and consolidate them into smaller areas. Because your computer does not have to work as hard to find all of these pieces it bus runs quicker.

Having run the defragmentation program or your hard drive then the next thing you should do is run your disk cleanup utility. This program also comes along in your computer when you bought it new all you have to do is tell the computer to run and do its job. It will then examine your hard drive for what are called bad sectors. The only thing that you have to know here about bad sectors is that they can slow your computer down and sometimes even make it impossible for you to retrieve important parts of files that you have stored in bad sectors. This program will identify and in some cases repair those bad sectors for you. Again another quick and easy and free fix for you.

And then there is the horror story of spyware programs. These are programs that on ethical marketers sneak onto your computer. You might download a nice pretty screen saver picture for your computer and discover that along with installing the new desktop picture that you have also installed one of these evil spyware programs. Please spyware programs will do anything from steal your passwords and pass them back to the owner of the spyware program or just began copying so much information that your computer slows to a crawl. You can download a copy of Microsoft’s Internet defender for free or step up your protection a couple of levels by purchasing one of the commercial spyware programs available on the Internet. The $30 or $40 that you spend for a commercial application will likely pay for it self many times over.

The next thing you want to do is spend a little bit of time removing some of the thousands of unnecessary files that are stored or in your computer’s hard drive. Again there are programs that Microsoft packaged in your computer that will help speed this process for you. In addition you will want to go into your control panel and obtain a list of all of the programs that are running on your computer. You will find some programs that the manufacturer installed on your computer that are absolute garbage. Uninstall them. If you also find programs that you have installed but never used any more install them as well.

This last tip may cost you $50-$100 to implement but it will probably do more then all of the other tips combined in terms of speeding up your computer. Check your instruction book that came along with your computer and see if it is operating with the full complement of random access memory. When you go to your local store to buy some more random access memory just tell them that you need a stick of memory for your computer and they will know what you are talking about. Take your instruction manual with you and they can look up the exact type of memory that you need. When you get home find a screwdriver to remove the case on your computer and in less than 10 minutes that you will find that even the most incompetent of us are shocked by how easy it is to install memory into our computers. If you can plug in a toaster in the morning then you can install additional memory in your computer.

These have been just a few obvious things that you can do; mostly free, to have your computer running faster in no time at all. Mostly these are, or should be, regular maintenance things that you do once a week or perhaps once a month if you do not use your computer too frequently. They don’t take a whole lot of time but they won’t make a big difference in the way your computer performs.

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