Speed up a Slow computer (Video)

Everyone complains of having a slow computer. It is a problem that is completely relative. Your computer is slower relative to when you first bought it or is slower relative to someone else’s computer. While it may not be possible for your computer to be as fast as the latest computers for sale today, there are a couple ways to get the maximum potential from what you have. This video shows you how to do that. Enjoy!

For more tips on how to speed up your computer you can read our comprehensive guide here.

Video transcript:

Hey, guys. Mark here from ReviverSoft.
Today I’m going to teach you how to fix a slow computer. This is a problem that a lot of people seem to have with their computer. I guess it’s a problem that’s always relative, right? It always seems slow compared to the day you first had it, or sometimes you might go and try somebody else’s computer and it’s newer, so yours all of a sudden seems slow. So the term slow is all relative.

I want to show a couple of ways … there’s really two main ways to speed up a slow computer. Those two main ways really depend on the type of slowness that you’re experiencing. The two ways that I’m talking about is, is your computer slow to start up and get going and be usable, and is your computer slow ongoing. So, as you’re using your computer, a few hours after you’ve started it up, if it’s still slow, then there’s another way to fix that type of problem.

First of all, I’ll start with if your computer is slow to start. If your computer is slow to start it typically means that you have too many applications running at startup. So, Windows when it boots up, it loads up all the Windows features and functions, and then it starts loading every application that you have set to run at Windows startup. If you have a lot of applications, the process of starting each and every application, and waiting for it to be finished starting up can take a really long time.

To give you some kind of an idea of what applications you have running at startup, as a quick glimpse, this is Windows 8, but this is very similar to other versions of Windows. If you go down to the bottom right hand task bar, you can see these icons for applications down here. If you have a lot of icons down here, that typically means you have a lot of applications running in the background, and quite often means you’ve got a lot of those applications, also, running at startup.

If you have a lot of applications down there, and don’t recognize many of them, you should really go through a review process, and check which ones you should have running at startup and which ones you should not. In order to do that, you hold the control, alt and delete buttons together, and this brings up a dialogue box. Then you click on the option for task manager. Now, this is different in Windows 8 than it is from Windows Vista and Windows 7, but the option for task manager is the same.

When you click on task manager, you then have this option come up. This is a list of processes that are currently running on your computer. This is not the screen we’re trying to get to. The screen we’re trying to get to is the startup tab. Now this startup tab shows all of the applications that are running on your computer at startup, and here you’ll see for me I have quite a few applications listed here, and I don’t need all of them.
I can’t tell you which applications you have, because I haven’t seen your computer, but the important thing is to go through each of these individual applications, and say to yourself, “Do I really need that to start when my Windows startup happens?”

You could wait for it to start later. You could just chose to open it later after startup. I’ll give you an example here. I have iTunesHelper that starts at Windows startup. I don’t use iTunes immediately when I start my computer. An iTunesHelper is a service that Apple has that checks for updates and helps iTunes start faster. I don’t use iTunes on a daily basis, so I don’t really need to have iTunesHelper launching every time I start my computer up.

To get rid of this application from running at startup, you right click on it, and then just click disable. Your option might be different in Windows Vista and Windows 7, but the process is till the same. Then you can go through and do that to all these different applications that you have listed here.

Don’t be afraid to disable some that you think you might need later. You can always come back to this dialogue box, and then re-enable them if you notice some kind of peculiarity going on.

Some other ones that might be useful to disable are update notifications, as quite often you’ll see ones for Google update. You’ll see ones for instant messaging clients if you have like a Windows Live Messenger or Yahoo Messenger, or AOL Messenger. You might, also, see ones for … I wouldn’t disable anti-virus applications, because they’re typically needed to run all the time so your system is secure, but sometimes you’ll see ones for (inaudible 00:04:24) applications, for printers, for things that that you just don’t really need to run at startup.

Go through, be ruthless. Go and disable a bunch of startup items, and then restart your computer and notice the impact. You’ll notice that it’s a lot faster to boot up. So, go through that process.

The second one way that your computer might be slow, which I spoke about, was when it is slow in general. It is always kind of slow and sluggish. That typically means that you have a limited amount of resources that are being consumed, and you can tell that it’s getting slow because when you try to open something, it takes a long time, like a file or a web page or something, and the way that you have to try and fix that problem is by reducing the amount of resources that you’re using all the time on your computer.

You do that by either disabling or uninstalling applications running in the background that you don’t need. The process I just showed you before, about turning things off from running at startup, actually fixes a lot of this problem, because a lot of these applications that would normally start up and just sit there running in the background all the time, will be disabled from even starting at startup.

So, step one, do what I just mentioned in step one.

Step two is actually uninstalling applications you don’t need, because that’s, one, going to free up hard drive space, and, two, that is, also, going to disable whatever process that’s associated to the application that you’re uninstalling. It’s going to stop it from running at all.

To uninstall an application, in Windows 8 you need to go to the control panel, like every other version of Windows, but to get there it’s a little bit different. You go to the settings option in the charms bar, and then you go to programs and features. So, click there, and here you’ll find a list of all the different programs that you have installed on your computer. Go through this list and look for ones that you just don’t use anymore. If there’s ones that you might use, keep them. Don’t delete ones that you might use on a frequent basis or even an infrequent basis.

There’s a couple of tricks that you can do here. One, you can look for applications that have been installed at an older date. There’s this column here that’s installed on. If you click it, it sorts it by either oldest to newest, or newest to oldest. I’ve just sorted it from oldest to newest, and you can see that there’s quite a few applications here that I had bundled with my computer that I never use. I don’t really use the Dell Support Center. I very rarely use CyberLink Media Suite. They’re two applications that I can uninstall, because I just don’t use them, and they probably take up some sort of process or processor usage while I’m using my computer, so it will have a good impact on PC performance.

The other column that’s useful is the size column. You can sort by size, and find applications that are the biggest, and uninstall those. That’s, one, just going to free up hard drive space, and, two, it’s going to help you with whatever processes that are associated with that application.

There are two of the main ways to improve the performance of a PC. I will include a link below, to a list of nine ways to improve the performance of your PC, if you want to get even further into the process, and make it perform even better, but these two ways will really help you.

I hope that I’ve been a help today, and I’ll look forward to seeing you in a future ReviverSoft video. Thanks, guys.