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Speed Up Your PC (Part 1)

By Mohammad Yousef | July 2004

Is your 3GHz beast slowing down? Well, don’t worry ‘cause help is at hand. Most PC users complain that the performance of their machines keeps on slowly deteriorating. However, I have some good news: you can easily reclaim part of the lost speed. And although the tips I’m going to give you, do boost performance, my advice is not to be too optimistic either. The increase in speed is often marginal and too small to notice but this doesn’t mean they’re not worth a try.

Defragment your drives: defragmenting is like reorganizing fragmented files and folders so that your system can access them more efficiently. Defragmenting one to three times every month should be enough depending on how often you install and remove files. If you install and uninstall large files often, you should defrag more frequently. To access the Disk Defragmenter which comes bundled with Windows, click Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools and Disk Defragmenter.

Kill spyware: when your PC starts to get slower, one of the likely culprits is spyware. To scan for and remove spyware, I recommend two free programs: Ad-Aware and Spybot. Another tool I like is SpywareBlaster which tries to prevent spyware instead of removing them. SpywareBlaster won’t consume your system resources because you don’t even need to keep it running. Whatever you decide to use make sure to keep the program updated. And remember to use at least one of the two scanning programs even if you run SpywareBlaster because it can’t prevent everything.

Remove fonts that you don’t use: although fonts are probably the last thing you’d suspect of slowing down your PC, having 200 or more fonts can easily slow boot times. So if you decide to get rid of some excess fonts, a freeware called X-Fonter will make the task quite easy. Just be careful not to delete any system fonts!

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