Saturday, December 6, 2014

10 awesome tips I discovered to make the computer load faster

No patience and the computer takes around 5-10 mins to load? It's normal. When computers come from the store, it loads in less than one minute. There are no programs installed by you, no files to make the task heaviers and everything is runnign smoothly. As months go by, the boot time increases and increases... and again.

What can you do about that?

Many many things.

1. Delete or archive all files not in use. Do you like to make your computer a big storage of digital files? Bad idea. Since Windows Vista that Windows has the desktop search. That means indexing all the files almost in real time and each file added to the index, makes the computer slower. Get an external hard drive and backup (finally) everything you don't need on a daily basis. There will be less digital stuff getting on the way of the work and the computer will increase the overall speed considerably.

2. Run CCleaner and clean the history, cache, temporary files and the registry. This will make a wonder because sometimes programs stop working because of those files there that don't make a difference. Run that software at least once per month. For intensive computer users, run once a week.

3. Delete all the programs you don't need anymore or at least daily. Each software you install makes the computer just a little bit slower. Dozens of programs make it much slower. Today there are portable apps. Basically they do the same thing as the installed version with the advantage of not adding more boot time to the computer. Portable apps are the future in my opinion. You can run them all even from a pen drive.

4. Install more RAM in the computer. If Windows runs out of RAM right during the boot time (happens with machines with less than 4 GB of RAM) the boot speed will increase because Windows has to move somes files to the virtual memory. Today at least 8 GB is the normal. 4 GB is not enough for most users today.

5. Control which applications run right after the boot. Antivirus, real player, media player, games, whatever. They are consuming boot time. Disable them or better remove them.

6. Check the computer for virus and spyware every week. While you are enjoying Friday night, let the computer do the heavy lifting and run a full system scan - every week.

7. Remove all the apps from Windows 8 you don't know, don't care and don't like. Windows 8 likes to make easy to install apps but each app is more boot time. Most apps are useless. Windows 10 will probably make a big change to that since apps were not the expected success.

8. Defrag the computer often is the hard disk you still use is a big TB drive. Windows does not write the files on the disk sequentially. Instead it breaks the files into smaller bits of files and every time it needs to access those files, it has to move the mechanical head over and over again. Windows defrag is cool but Smart Defrag is way better.

9. If none of the above got your computer back in time when it came from the store well the solution is to backup every single thing and install Windows again. A fresh start is needed almost every year for intense computer users. Windows is not a perfect operating system. Sometimes the big word format must be used.

10. The ultimate way to get your computer load faster and literally kick everything at the speed of light is to install an SSD hard drive. It's the fastest thing ever invented for the computer. Since there are no moving parts in this hard disk, Windows is able to get everything faster from it. The speed for the fastest SSD drives is something like 550 MB/s compared with 50-100 MB/s for the mechanical versions of the same thing. That's just sequential reading. In random reading those 100 MS/s drop to even lower numbers.

Is the machine loading faster already?

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