1
Defragment your computer's hard drive at least once every two months.
One of the easiest fixes to a slow computer is usually the most overlooked, defragmenting. When your computer defragments its hard drive, it takes broken pieces of information, and puts them back together again. It also rearranges the data in clusters that are easier and faster for your computer to obtain. Long story short, it's a simple fix that might solve many of your problems.
To defragment your hard drive in Windows, click on the start button > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter
Depending on the size of your hard drive and how fragmented the data is, this could take anywhere from an hour to SEVERAL, so make sure to do this when you aren't planning on using your computer
for a while.
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Step 2
Get a good spyware or antivirus program.
Find a good antivirus/spyware program. This is an absolute must these days. Viruses and spyware can wreak havoc on your computer, causing crashes, loss of data, and even identity theft. To keep these monsters at bay, and your computer running fast, you will need a good antivirus/spyware program. Norton Antivirus is the tried-and-true. It can be a little pricey though. If you are short on cash, you can download free AVG, which is a great program, from this website: http://free.avg.com/
Make sure that you run an virus scan with whatever program you choose, at least once a week. These days, if your computer is running slow, it is usually due to spyware. Spyware is much more common now than viruses are. To put it in perspective, you probably have 1,000 spyware files on your computer for every virus.
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Step 3
Clean out your browsing history regularly.
Lastly, clean out your cookies, and internet browsing history frequently. There is a great program called CleanUp!, that cleans out all the junk files in your computer. These can accumulate over time and rob your computer of free space, and performance. You can download the program at www.stevengould.org. Best of all it's FREE! I run CleanUp! at the end of every day. It only takes a couple minutes, and I know that my computer remains free from all those junk files.
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