How to Speed Up Your PC

Dust the cobwebs off your aging PC and get it back in top form with these simple tips for speed.

You can find entire websites and enthusiast communities dedicated to cutting your Windows boot time by milliseconds and squeezing every last drop of visual performance from your system in high-end games like Crysis, but what does the average Joe do when his once-trusty steed begins to limp? Put her down and buy a new one, usually.

That’s a pretty poor option when many people are struggling to even make rent and pay mortgages, and as most tech-savvy geeks know, it’s usually not necessary, either. Therefore we’ve rounded up a few simple ways to go about unclogging the congested arteries of your poor machine and restoring it to its former athletic glory, along with inexpensive ways to upgrade it without springing for a brand new desktop.

The following tips stack up in order of increasing difficulty: Steps one through three represent relatively simple (and free) tasks that novices can undertake to upgrade their machines, while steps four and five require a bit more knowledge, time, and in some cases, money, to accomplish. Follow them in order, and you’ll be on your way back to peak performance in no time.

Step 1: Check for Viruses

Your first step should be checking for viruses. When it comes to system slowdown, they’re the culprit the majority of the time, and because most good anti-virus software can remove them automatically, you won’t have to invest much time in ensuring your PC is clean. We recommend the free versions of Avira AntiVir and AVG Antivirus. Both offer comprehensive virus scanning with free updates, as well as the built-in ability to deal with the viruses that crop up (many “free online scanners” will only point out the problem then ask you to buy something before you can do anything about it). Either program will walk you through the scanning and cleaning process after you download it, leaving your computer squeaky clean – or at least free of the really bad stuff.

Avira AntiVir and AVG Antivirus

Step 2: Defragment Your Hard Drive

Fun fact: As you save and delete things from your hard drive, your data gets scattered across the drive in bits and pieces, rather than solid chunks. That means your hard drive may have to look in 15 places just to retrieve a single file, rather than one, and it slows things down in the process. Defragmenting the drive will rearrange the pieces in an order that makes more sense, speeding up access times. Just look for the defragment tool under System Tools in your Accessories folder, click “defragment,” sit back, and wait. Depending on how big your drive is, allowing it to run overnight might not be a bad idea.

Defragmenting a drive

Step 3: Clean up Your Files

If your computer now runs significantly slower than when you first dragged it home from the store and plugged it in, it didn’t get there on its own. Somewhere along the line, you clicked “OK” on one too many checkboxes asking you to install something, popped in one too many CDs, and experimented with one too many pieces of “free” software. (You know what we’re talking about.) Now it takes five minutes to start up, gives you three different errors whenever you try to start your browser, and crashes every hour or so.

Many people hear this advice and take it to mean that simply having too many things on a computer’s hard drive causes it to run slow – a common misunderstanding – but in reality, how full a hard drive is has nothing to do with how faster a PC operates, unless it’s right to the brim and no longer has enough breathing room for Windows to write temporary files. The real issue is that many of the programs you install have components that run all the time, burdening your PC’s processor. For instance: iTunes is a great program, but did you know it has two components that run invisibly in the background all the time, whether you’re using them or not? Both are there to help iTunes communicate with an iPod when you plug it in, but if you don’t own one, they’re just gobbling up memory and slowing your CPU.

You can easily view a list of everything humming away in the background bring up by holding down ctrl, alt and delete to bring up the Windows Task Manager. However, we recommend a more user-friendly interface called ProcessScanner, from Uniblue. It will give you more details on vague process names (what is RTHDCPL.exe, anyway?), where they came from, whether you need them, and how to get rid of them if you don’t. Another, more complex app for this purpose is Processor Explorer, which Microsoft offers for free. You can right-click on any process and do a quick Google search for its name, which is the most comprehensive way to find out what it’s up to and how to deal with it. Windows XP users can also follow these simple instructions to effortlessly prevent unnecessary programs from loading at startup, while Windows Vista users can see here instead.

Processor Explorer

After combing through all the processes and weeding out ones that don’t need to run, your computer should perform significantly faster, especially on bootup when it no longer needs to load a dozen programs as soon as Windows opens. If not, it’s time to call in the big guns.

Step 4: Start from Scratch

Now we’re getting into the territory where novices fear to tread – for good reason. Wiping everything off your computer and starting again from nothing can be quite daunting, but at some point, it’s also the only way to go. Even if you take relatively good care of your computer, it will eventually reach a point where it’s easier to start anew than try to track down every single individual problem causing it to malfunction or run slowly.

First, pull off all your important files, and write down the names of the programs you can’t live without. That probably means putting your MP3s and video onto an external hard drive, along with anything else you you’re hoping to save, like bookmarks, e-mail folders, and saved game files (it took you four weeks to get to that level!). An external hard drive is an inexpensive and easy way to preserve them all, but you can find nine other ways in our guide to backing up data.

Back up your files to an external hard drive

If you own a computer from a major manufacturer, reinstalling everything from scratch should be as simple as inserting a recovery CD and choosing the option (like “restore”) that will put your computer back to the way it was when you bought it. Some companies don’t even require a disk – all the information it needs is squirreled away on a hidden part of the hard drive that it will access when it’s time to start from a blank slate again. Lenovo, for instance, makes this available using the ThinkVantage button on its ThinkPad notebooks.

If you don’t have a restore disc, it’s just more work. You’ll need a key for Windows, which can sometimes be found printed on a label on your PC, and an install disc. We can’t cover the entire process in the span of this article, but Lifehacker has already done a great step-by-step install guide for those who need a helping hand.

Reinstalling Windows Vista

Step 5: Upgrade

If you’re running a fresh install of Windows and still having issues running certain programs, like newer games, you’ve hit the upper limits of what you can do with the hardware you have. Sorry, no more software tricks. You’re going to have to swap out some guts to clear any headway.

But don’t let that scare you away. While hardcore PC tweakers may upgrade their systems piece by piece and agonize over each one, you only really have to think about a couple key parts in an upgrade scenario.

The first is RAM, which serves as system memory. If you tend to run a lot of programs at once and notice sluggishness when switching between them, RAM will speed things up significantly. To figure out how much you have, you can look at “System” under your Windows control panel. To figure out how much you can add, you’ll have to look under the hood, because it depends on how many sockets your motherboard has. We recommend checking out eHow.com for step-by-step advice on how to actually install the RAM, and PCWorld’s upgrade guide for specifics on selecting the right specs. RAM is incredibly cheap at the moment, so if you decide to do it, we recommend you go all the way and max out what your system can handle.

Installing additional RAM

The second part to consider is your video card. Chances are, if you have an inexpensive PC, you’re using integrated graphics built into the motherboard, rather than a separate graphics processing unit (GPU) with a lot more power. If you’re having issues playing 3D games, adding a GPU (or a faster one than what you have) might be enough of a speed boost to let you play titles you couldn’t have played before. Just make sure your motherboard can handle the card you buy: Older PCs use an AGP port, while newer ones use PCI Express. You can reference your computer’s manual if you’re not sure which you have. Also, be sure to choose a card toward the cheaper end (under $100) of what’s available at any given moment, since the rest of your system will act as a bottleneck on high-end cards, preventing you from taking full advantage of their power anyway. Reference our guide to selecting a video card for more help.

Upgrade your video card

Though many people would recommend upgrading your CPU as an additional step, we feel the complexity of that sort of upgrade far outstrips what most people simply looking for more speed are willing to deal with. If you’re looking at a new processor, you might want to be looking at a new computer instead.

Stepping Back

It’s easy to get the impression that opening your pocketbook is the only path to better performance. But given all the options, it’s really just a last resort for the casual user whose PC seems to be approaching the end of its lifetime. Tackle the process of speeding up your computer one step at a time, and you’ll usually find that your PC returns to a useable state long before it’s time to start plugging in additional parts.