Windows Running Slow? Here Are Some Free Ways To Fix A Slow PC

Over time a computer can slowly begin to grind to a halt due to a number of factors. Remedying these problems can often be easily done through some good housekeeping activities. These activities are not particularly technical. Rather they can be run by any computer novice and best of all they require no additional cost.

* Ensure that you have at least 10% free disk space on each of your drives. Anything less & Windows performance can start to deteriorate. I have started with this activity as having less than 10% free disk space will dramatically slow down your PC. If you are under 10% then the following checks/tasks will help.

* Uninstall applications that you do not use often to free up disk space. Run this via the Control Panel. Be ruthless about removing applications you use infrequently.

* Shut down any software application you use infrequently (the applications you see in the Task Bar). You probably are not using more than 3 applications at any one time so there is little point in keeping extra applications open that are hogging system resources.

* Close down services you are not using. This is different from closing applications that you see on your task bar. Open the MS Task Manager on the Processes tab & close down any EXE s you don t require. Only close EXEs that are familiar to you (e.g. Skype etc). An alternate free tool is Sysinternal s Process Explorer which provides extra information about the running EXEs such as the files creator which will help you decide on which services to kill.

* Do a complete PC reboot. A reboot clears out the RAM & Virtual Memory of any memory slots that have not been freed up by applications (this can be due to faults in these software applications.

* Manually run the Microsoft Windows Update service (found in the Start Menu). Updates generally fix faults some of which can be performance related so it is worthwhile to update regularly to get these benefits.

* Use a registry & file clean up tool such as Windows own Disk Cleanup application or CCleaner to remove the multitude of cached files & data residing on your PC that is no longer being used or required. If you are a frequent Internet user then you will discover that the web browser caches huge amounts of files.

* Defragment all your hard drives. You can do this using a free tool from Auslogic called Disk Defrag tool or Microsoft s Defragmentation Tool (that comes installed with Windows operating systems). Over time large files are split across partitions on your hard drives into many fragments which will slow down accessing the files. Processes & memory are used to locate & load each fragment. Defragmentation reassembles the files back into one chunk.

This article lists the free ways of gaining some PC performance. To get further benefits try reading David s Reimage review to find out how this one stop pc fix: http://www.pcmaintenancereimage.com/why/ & pc maintenance software: http://www.pcmaintenancereimage.com/ can speed up & stabilise your PC.