The computer when bought newly may work faster but as the time passes, its performance degrades and may not work at the same speed as it used to.This generally happens as the system gets filled with the more and more applications over the time and sometimes even the Virus or malicious files in the system can lead to this problem.
There are some tips that you can follow to improve your laptop’s performance:
1. Freeing the disk space:
The Disk Cleanup is one of the utilities available in windows which will help you to clean the hard disk of your laptop by removing the unused files.
To run this utility, click on Start and select Run.
Type cleanmgr in the Run window and click on OK.
Now, this will open the Disk Cleanup window where you can select the options like Temporary Internet files or Empty Recycle Bin, etc to clean your hard disk.
You can also open Disk Cleanup by following the below steps:
1. Right click on a disk and select Properties.
2. In the General tab, click on Disk Cleanup.
You also have More options tab where you can remove the unused Windows Components, unused Programs and even remove the old restore points to free the hard disk space in your laptop.
It is always better to remove the programs that you no longer use as this can save some space on hard disk.
2. Fixing the file system errors and recovering bad sectors of hard disk:
We may not notice the system errors in our hard disk that can lessen the speed of your laptop, removing or fixing these errors can increase the speed up the PC to some extent. This can be done by using the Check Now option.
Select a disk and right click on it and click on Properties.Click on Tools tab, select Check Now and in the Check Disk window that appears, select Automatically fix file system error and Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors and start the process by clicking on Start. In the Checking Disk window, click on Yes to restart the computer. The disk will be scanned for file system errors after the laptop is restarted.
3. Defragmenting hard disk:
When you save a file on the disk, it is usually fragmented into small files and these files are stored on different locations in the disk. When you need a file, the hard drive merges this files that are present in different locations and unites them into a single file and then presents you the original file. This process slows down the speed of your computer and you can avoid this by using Disk Defragmenter in windows that defragments these files on the hard disk making it easy to retrieve a file.
To open Disk Defragmenter, right click on a disk and select Tools tab.
Select Defragment Now and in the Disk Defragmenter window that appears select Analyze to analyze and after its completion you can start Defragmentation by clicking on Defragment.
4. Removing Virus and Spyware using Antivirus and Antispyware software
5. Cleaning the registry can help you to improve the performance of the computer to some extent CCleaner is one of the best softwares which can delete the temporary files, empty Recycle Bin, delete incorrect registry entries. CCleaner can be downloaded for free from ccleaner website.
6. Removing Spyware or Virus using Windows Defender and Malicious Software Removal tool
In contrast to the various antivirus softwares and the antispyware tools available, we have Windows tools such as Windows Defender and Windows Malicious Software Removal tool.This tools are similar to antivirus softwares but not as powerful as the Antivirus softwares (Norton, McAfee,etc). Windows Defender and Windows Malicious Software Removal tool can be download for free from Microsofts downloads.
7. Disable the less frequently used Startup Programs
Disable the rarely used Startup Programs to optimize your PC.
You can remove these programs from Start tab in the System Configuration Utility window.
Type msconfig in Run and click on OK and in the System Configuration Utility window that opens select Start tab and disable the programs that are not required at Startup.
Note: Do not disable the windows related programs.
8. Keeping your system up to date:
Update windows regularly for better performance and also update the drivers and antivirus or antispyware softwares.
9. You can tune your Vista laptop by using TweakVI basic free edition to improve the performance of your system and use TweakUI (One of the Microsoft PowerToys tool) for Windows XP.
The above steps will help you in improving the performance of your laptop.
