Optimizing your computer's performance

Slow computers are the bane of anyone's life these days, fortunately there are ways to combat this gruesome monster. There isn't a computer in the world that doesn't experience some sort of lag in its performance, so here are a few tips to help you get your computer running at peak performance.

Firstly scan your computer for any spyware, adware and viruses. These alone can account for the major slowdown in your computer. Remove any spyware that is present on your computer. If this doesn't do the trick its time to get into the nitty gritty of optimizing your computer, Windows XP and Windows Vista both have built in resources to help combat sluggishness, the first of which is your disk cleanup. To access youe disk clean up hit start--->accesories--->system tools----> disk cleanup. You can easily specify which files you want to clean and this often not only improved computer performance but also removes alot of unwanted files on your system. Once you have completed this task the next thing to do is to delete any temporary internet fils/cookies. The easiest way to do this is to open up Intenet explorer and hit tools--->internet options--->delete files, delete cookies. This will remove added internet based clutter on your computer. I would recommend that you download Windows Defender from the microsoft website. Once you've got this you can use it to manage the programs you are running. The beauty of Windows Defender is that you can see what each program does and even change disable some of your startup programs that you don't need.

Now that you've complete these steps there is one last thing to do and that is to defragment your harddrive. When you install programs in your computer, alot of files get shuffled around and so the computer has to take added time finding necessary files because they are fragmented. By defragmenting your harddrive you ( as the name suggests) defragment these files and make them more consistent. This makes it easier for your computer to search for files and ultimately improves performance. I put this as the last step because it usually takes a long time to complete but in the end it's worth it.