Make Your Computer Run Programs Faster

If you are like a lot of people in America, your pc is probably about 2 years old and you are contemplating whether to upgrade the old one or buy a new one. Looking at the cost factor, you figure the investment in a new PC reasonable in price and painless. But there are a handful of people who are unable to just go out there and buy a new pc, whether its financial reasons or the company does not want to get a new pc for you. So the question is, how do I make my current pc work more efficient so I can help save money? If you are running a Windows 98 or Windows ME box, your software was not designed to promptly manage memory. After having the pc running for about 4 hours you will begin to see massive slowdown and eventually the pc would crash, forcing you to reboot the computer to continue. There are a few ways hover; you can delay the inevitable by following these easy steps to insure your pc moves fast enough to meet your demands.

1. Defrag! Think of your hard drive as a room, and when the room is messy its hard to find anything. By "cleaning" your room, you put data in proper order so it's easier for the pc to find stuff. If you neglect to do this, errors will occur because the pc will process wrong information thinking it was in a spot where the data is incorrect. To defrag, just click start/programs/accessories/system tools/disk defragmenter. This process usually takes 3-5 hours and its best to either stop using the computer during this time, or reboot the pc in safe mode to make sure there are no programs running during this process. Defragging will speed your computer up by 30%

2. More RAM! Even though windows 98 and Windows Millennium Edition only can read 64 MB at a time, more memory is still good if you are going to run multiple programs at the same time. This method will not force the pc to slow down to compensate for the extra memory needed for the extra program. Whereas windows 2000 and XP can utilize the RAM much better it's never a bad thing to bulk up on RAM especially at the great prices RAM is at now. For a PC fewer than 500 MHZ, go buy PC66/PC100 RAM which has 168 pins on it. If you have a PC 500MHz to 1 GHz, Go buy PC133 Ram Which has 168 pins on it. Now if you have 1 GHz or faster processor, you should upgrade to windows XP and get DDR RAM which is 184 pins and runs at about 2100 MHz or 27 MHz depending on the motherboard you have.

3. Disk cleanup! By deleting all the junk files on your pc along with optimizing the registry, you stop windows from scanning the entire list of junk data looking for legitimate files when the PC boots up. His saves about 20-30 seconds off the boot up time. The built in file cleanup program is not that good, but it serves its purpose when you are desperate to free up some space. Go to start/programs/accessories/system tools/disk cleanup. You may want to create a shortcut on your desktop for these programs for easier access.

4. Eliminate startup programs! When you boot your pc, a list of startup programs automatically execute, thus slowing down your pc. If you click start/run and type in "msconfig" (don't use the quotes) you will go to the System Configuration Utility. Go to the startup tab and look for any programs that you don't want to start with the computer. Uncheck those and then you can start them manually when you need them.