Five Ways to Make your Computer Boot and Run Faster

Have you ever wondered why your programs aren’t loading as quickly as before, or why you have time to brush your teeth twice while your computer boots? Most likely the questions are related, and it has a lot to do with the cleanliness of your computer. Here are five proven ways to improve the boot times and increase the speed of your computer.

1. Disk Optimization

The most important factor in hard drive speed is how fragmented it is. Fragmentation occurs when files on the computer end up being split up all over the hard drive, in thousands of fragments. As you can well understand, it takes time for the computer to locate and read all of those fragments. So, to clean this mess up, go to Start->Programs->Accessories->System Tools->Disk Defragmenter. From there you can clean up all the files that are split, and this will greatly increase the responsiveness of your system.

Another factor in the hard drive area is how full the hard drive is. A hard drive is most efficient when it is only 75-85% full. So, if you have extra files (especially pictures, music, and videos) get rid of them somehow, and your computer will be quite thankful.

2. Antivirus

It has been said that a virus targets a Windows computer every 5 minutes. If you don’t like that, feel free to read my hub about Linux: http://hubpages.com/hub/Windows-XP-vs-Ubuntu-904. However, if you want to keep your Windows system, you’ll have to make sure that your antivirus is functional and up-to-date, and then run a virus scan. If you don’t have any viruses, this probably won’t help, but if you do have one, the scan could very possibly increase the speed of your computer more than all the others combined.

3. Registry Cleaning

In Windows computers, there is a very important database called the registry. This database stores all of the settings and preferences for the operating system and the installed programs. Over time, this starts to have invalid entries, wrong links, and overall bad performance. Often you can find hundreds of errors with one registry scan, so its well worth your time. I used a free registry cleaner called EasyCleaner (http://majorgeeks.com/EasyCleaner_d414.html). You have to be careful with anything to do with your registry, so check out how you can backup your registry here: http://www.ehow.com/how_5156182_backup-registry.html. Once you have EasyCleaner, use it to find errors in your registry and fix them.

4. Startup Programs

More often than not, startup programs are a big source of wasted processing power in startup and in use. Almost every manufacturer loves to put a startup program on your computer to keep their product updates, or to constantly show you their company symbol (it’s free marketing after all!). To get rid of some of these useless startup programs, use the EasyCleaner program from above and take a look at the list of startup programs. If it has a red dot next to it, it’s a dud, and is just a bad entry. You can delete those. You should also look for programs that you don’t need, and take them off the list as well. Make sure you know what it does, though. You don’t want to take out a program that you actually need! If in doubt, google the program, and don’t delete programs that are found in the C:\Windows folder.

5. Icons and Quick Launch Programs.

This was a big one for me. I always had lots of quick laucn programs, those little icons next to the start button. Apparently, these can slow you boot time down, so try to take out the ones that you don’t need, as well as the icons on your desktop.

After having done all these things to my laptop, I reduced my boot time from four and a half minutes to a minute fifty-three seconds. Still not great (I think I have a slow hard drive), but that’s a huge improvement! I’m very happy with the results, and I hope you will be too.