Five free ways to speed up your computer

As computers age, they tend to get slower for a number of reasons. Drew investigates why and how you can fix it, for free!

Clean up your desktop
If you fill your car with boxes of items you will be using over the next month, your car will consume more fuel per kilometre than if those items were in your garage. That is a similar concept to removing programs from your desktop. Your Random Access Memory (RAM) has a standard rate at which it runs, depending on the passive programs you have open. These include the desktop icons it is constantly looking at and even the desktop image.

While removing your desktop image may be going to the extreme, if you have a number of different program shortcuts, images and various other documents sitting on the desktop, it is worth deleting or storing them in a folder to help your computer process information faster.

Clean the dust out of the box
Dust gets everywhere, no matter how hard you try to keep it out. That is true for inside your computer case as well. You may have never opened your computer case, generally there are screws at the back on the side which have to be removed with a screwdriver, or can be removed by hand. Dell computers are a little different and have a button you push.

The amount of dust that can build up over the space of a year or two is remarkable. Disconnect your computer for at least 10 minutes and ensure you have shoes on which have rubber in them in the case of a discharge of electric residue.
Do not remove any of the components. Use a vacuum to remove the dust from inside the computer. You may need to use tissues to wipe out some of the more entrenched dust around the fans of your Computer Processing Unit (CPU). You can also use a soft tipped toothbrush to remove the dust, as this will not scratch any of the computer parts.

Scan your computer for viruses and adware
A leading cause of slowing your computer down would have to be viruses and adware. These infections monitor every process on your computer and cause further increases in the use of the computer’s RAM. It is important to keep an updated virus program on your computer at all times and to have a secondary adware removal program such as ad-aware or malwarebytes.

Remove programs you no longer use
You install a program like Google Earth, a video game or even download a movie only to find it sits there wasting space. The problem is that many games or programs open a specific file on start up. The remove programs function found in your Control Panel is great for removing programs, as it shows you every single program installed on your computer and uninstalls them with the click of a button.

Upgrade your drivers
The most difficult process which will increase the speed of your computer is to upgrade the drivers which were installed. Companies are constantly coming out with updates to the software which helps the hardware installed inside your box, run more efficiently. The best way to do this is if you still have the boxes of the products, to write down the names and codes and visit the manufacturers website and go to the download system. Alternatively, you may need to open up your computer box and write down the manufacturer and model name, which is on every unit. It is important to know that you will not have to update anything for the RAM, as this does not come with software.