Simple Things You Can Do To Speed Up a Slow Computer

Defrag To Speed Up Your Computer

When your computer stores a document, it starts to put the document in the first area of free space on your hard drive and then when it runs out of room there, it stores another part of the file on the next space available and so on, until the entire document is stored. One simple Word document may be stored in many different spots. When you access the fragmented document again, it has to go to all the spots on your hard drive, gather the information, put it together and then display it. If you have a lot of fragmented files it takes time for the computer to find the data. It will take a while to run defrag so you might want to leave this task for last (like before bed) and you should free up as much space as possible before defraging, To defrag your hard drive with Windows XP, go to:

• Start
• Programs
• Accessories
• System Tools
• Disk Defragmenter

Other Windows operating systems has the disk defragementer tool in a similar location. If you can't find it, go to Windows help and search for "defrag" to find out how to run it.

Clean Temporary Files To Speed Up Your Computer

Windows loves to write files all the time to your hard drive and until you run out of room on your hard drive or ask it to clean it up, it will leave old temporary files there. Windows XP comes with a handy program that cleans them up.
To clean up temporary files on your hard drive with Windows XP, go to:

• Start
• Programs
• Accessories
• System Tools
• Disk Cleanup

For other Windows operating systems you may have manually remove temporary files. To find out how, go to Windows help and search for "temporary files".

Clean Up Your Desktop To Speed Up Your Computer

Having a clean desktop is important enough that Windows XP now asks you to clean up unused desktop icons. If you have always ignored the prompt like I used to, you can either clean them up manually by right clicking your mouse on them and selecting delete or you can access the Windows XP program.

• Start
• Control Panel
• Double-click "Display".
• Click the "Desktop" tab.
• Click the "Customize Desktop" button at the bottom.
• Click the "General" tab.
• Click the "Clean Desktop Now" button at the bottom.

Kill the Spyware To Speed Up Your Computer

Spyware seems to be almost unavoidable if you are online. I have always been very careful with keeping my virus protection up to date but I had a few spyware problems myself that was probably slowing down my computer. The basic version of AdAware is a free program that it will get rid of this annoyance.