5 Tips to Speed Up Your Computer

When your PC starts its steady decline into sloth-like speeds, the first thing you’d love to do (besides beating it Office Space-style) is head straight to the mall for a fancy new machine. But the reality is there are easy changes you can make to speed up your computer.

From startup to surfing to gaming, here are five ways you can clean up an old PC to make it look young again.

1. Speed Up Your Startup

If an entire pot of coffee can brew in the time it takes for your computer to boot, it’s time to make some changes. Most likely your computer is not slow – it’s the dozens of programs turning on during startup that are slowing it down.

Download a comprehensive tool like Autoruns to easily disable certain programs during your startup. Or try Windows’ slightly less thorough, built-in utility, MSConfig. To find it, go to Search or Run under Start and type “msconfig.” Under the “Startup” tab, uncheck the boxes of the programs you don’t need to run every time your computer is turned on, for instance, iTunes or your printer. If you don’t recognize a program, leave it be. Restart your computer and watch it fly.

2. Clear It Out

If painfully slow surfing is your main problem, there are a couple quick changes you can make.

Are you an Internet Explorer user? Get rid of it. Google Chrome is the best browser on the market now, known for speedy surfing. Under Chrome, go to Clear Browsing Data and check the boxes of temporary Internet files like cookies, cache, download history and browsing history.

To take further precaution, try a program like CCleaner from Piriform. The free software program removes temporary files from all of your browsers, as well as Windows and the registry, to make your PC run faster.

3. Slim Down

This involves more than just uninstalling programs you don’t use anymore. If you’re not totally committed to the usual suspects, like Windows Media Player and Microsoft Office, switch to something that requires less computing power. Free applications can easily replace go-to programs, while speeding up your PC and giving you additional features at the same time.

VLC Media Player is a lightweight, open source media player that rips DVDs, streams video and recognizes any unprotected media format. FoxIt Reader, an alternative to Adobe Reader, does more than just open PDFs all while using less RAM. Edit documents, open multiple PDFs in tabs and more. AbiWord, a free and open source word processor, and Apache’s Open Office, a free and open source full-fledge suite, can easily fill the void of Microsoft Office.

4. Automate Your Updates

Updates are annoying. It’s easy to click “remind me later” and avoid the notifications, until you’re so frustrated with your computer that you finally set aside an entire afternoon to update everything.

Let’s solve this. Go to My Computer > Properties > Automatic Updates. Make sure this is set to Download and Install Automatically. To completely cover your bases, find out if any programs need to be updated manually by downloading Update Checker from FileHippo.com. The fast and free program scans your computer and reports back with any available updates in seconds.

5. Make Some Upgrades

If you’re into gaming, a $150 investment in a graphics card might be worth your while. Forewarning: You’ll have to toy with your motherboard to make this upgrade happen, but there are a lot of online tutorials you can follow.

Finally, the most effective way to speed up your computer – which also requires tinkering – is to add more RAM (random access memory). You can find 4GB of memory for under $50 online. If you have less than 2GB (go to My Computer > Properties to find out), an upgrade should be in your future.

Useful Computer Tips That You Must to Know

Useful Tips To Know

When you are dealing with computer operation and implementation, you certainly want to know the right Computer Tips and Tricks that can help you with the overall deal.

The tips and tricks can help you manage your overall operation so your work will be more efficient, easier, simpler, and also more flexible. It also helps you to not dealing with long and slow process and operation which makes your working hour dull and boring. So, you don't have to worry about everything because your work will be handled faster and more efficient.

Find Internet Tips

One of the handy tips that are mostly shared is about internet tips. For example, you may learn about how to change the IP address without dealing with difficult or fussy details. You may also learn about how to boost the Wifi signal strength or how to share your big size files without having to register into one of the upload sites. If you want to browse around, you will see loads of handy tips that are written by the professionals and the experts, so you can do everything on your own. You don't have to spend more money to improve your internet enjoyment.

Windows 7 Tips

Another thing you may learn is about Windows 7 tricks and tips. If you have the Windows operating system, you can certainly make use of the available tips. You are free to choose whatever tips you want to learn. You will learn how to your flash drive well protected or how to remove the protection. You will also learn about boosting your booting ability with the Windows 7 with the so called ReadyBoost system, or how to create password system for your computer system. Again, you don't need to hire professional service to do so; simply do everything on your own and you will tweak your system like a pro. All the Computer Tips and Tricks will certainly be handy for your computing moment.

For the whole system, you will learn about various types of computer tricks including the internet tricks, the Windows 7 tips, Windows 8 tips, software tips, installation tips, and also battery tricks. All these subjects will help you manage simpler and easier computing operation and implementation. If you find difficulties on a certain topic, simply use the search box feature and type in the types of tricks and tips you want to know and learn. You will be directed to the right page in no time and you can learn new things on daily basis.

Article source: http://www.squidoo.com/computer-tips-and-tricks8

Tips and Tricks to Speed Up Your Computer

A slow computer is one of the most irritating things that could happen and therefore we would do anything in order to get it back to speed. Below are a few tips that would be able to help you out if you're trying to get your computer back up and running just the way you like it:

Switch off your anti-virus program
If at all you're working on a program that needs a lot of ram to work or maybe you're playing a game, there's no need of keeping your anti-virus turned on. Of course, some people are scared and that's the reason they keep it turned on all the time.

But, in such cases if you're not actually downloading anything you could just keep the firewall turned on and the main program could be turned off.

Connect to a power source
This may not seem relevant, but when you connect your laptop to a power source it would function better as in this case your laptop wouldn't try and hold back on any programs in order to save power.
Therefore, just by connecting to a power socket you may be able to speed up your laptop. It's not a considerable increase in speed, but every small bit helps.

Switch off programs that you don't use
Whenever you install a new program, it usually launches itself on startup. Therefore, you need to make sure that you get rid of unnecessary programs from your startup as this would only increase the startup time of your computer as well as slow down your computer on the whole as you'd have a load of programs running even though you're not using them.

Free up space
If your computer is running out of space you must consider buying an external hard drive as this would be able to help out a lot. The more free space your computer has, the more processing space it has and therefore the processes that you run, especially large programs and games would be able to run easily.

Clean up your computer
In this case we're not talking about getting rid of unnecessary programs. Of course that's going to help a lot too. But, more importantly you need to make sure that you keep your laptop or computer free of dust particles.

Dust can slow down your computer a lot and it would even destroy various components of your system. You would be able to do this on your own with ease or if necessary you could hire someone to do this for you on an occasional basis.

If you're looking for more computer tips and tricks, take a look at some of the computer tricks

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Abhishek_Kumar_Khandelwal

The Best Way to Improve Your Computer's Performance

You can tweak almost every component of your PC to make its performance optimal. You only have to look for computer tips and tricks. You can tweak its hardware to make it work faster and more efficient than it usually does and its software to make all applications that are installed on your computer run perfectly with as efficient resources as possible. This article features some tips and tricks that guide you to weak or to tune up your PC's hardware and software.

Tweaking Your Computer's Hardware
There are a number of hardware components of your PC that you can tune up in order to improve its performance. Because the most essential part of your computer is its processor, you can start by tweaking it. Overclock is the most familiar term that PC users usually use to refer to CPU tune-up process. There are two easy ways to tweak your computer's CPU. If your computer is manufactured within the last four years, you can easily overclock your PC's CPU by modifying its BIOS or UEFI BIOS setup. When you access your computer's BIOS, you should try to locate CPU Operating Speed, FSB Clock and PCI Clock settings and alter their values. If you cannot find those settings in your PC's BIOS, then your computer is an old one. For old PC, overclocking can be done by changing the jumper settings of your computer's motherboard. Because different CPUs have different performance peak, there is no universal rule of how to overclock your CPU. You can experiment with different settings until you figure out the performance peak of your PC. If you have assigned a particular value to your CPU clock speed setting and the PC crashes or doesn't boot properly when you turn it on, then your computer has gone beyond its performance peak. You should thus lower that value a little bit in order to keep your computer running properly. If you cannot access the BIOS to reset its settings, you should locate the motherboard's 3-pin jumper labeled "reset bios" or "clear CMOS," remove the jumper that connects the first and the second pins, and attach it to connect the second and the third pins. Some new computers allow you to tune up the performance of their CPU and Video card by using built-in application that you can access after you start your computer.

Tweaking Your Computer's Software
Tweaking your computer's software is much simpler and easier than tweaking its hardware. You can use third-party applications to tweak your computer's system environment, alter its operating system by using the already-installed standalone programs, or alter the setting of all applications that are installed on it.
There is a large selection of third-party programs that you can use to do some tweaking jobs on your PC. You can, for example, use Teracopy to copy files and folders much more quickly or use BatteryCare to extend your laptop's battery life. Just surf the internet and you can mostly find hundreds of programs that you can use to tweak your computer.

You can also tweak your computer's operating system by altering its settings using any built-in applications that are installed on your computer when you install its operating system. If you are using Windows operating system, for example, you can prevent it from making record of recent files that you open by accessing its taskbar and start menu properties setting or prevent it from running autoplay function by altering its group policy setting (GPEDIT.MSC) if you are using Windows XP or by changing its autoplay setting at Control Panel if you are using the later versions of Windows.

A number of programs that you have installed on your computer also have standalone tweaking functions. If you are interested in knowing the hidden features of all programs that you install on your computer, you can try to search for its "hidden features" or "Easter eggs" by using internet.

There are thousands of computer tips and tricks that you can find when you are online. By referring to those tips and tricks, you can alter your computer the way you want.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Hendro_Rudiansyah