When I’m at work, I constantly get complaints about computers running slow. There’s usually not much that could be done to drastically increase performance but there are a few things you can do that can make a noticeable difference. Here are a few quick things anyone can do to help deal with a sluggish computer.

First of all, don’t worry about messing up and making irreversible changes to your computer. The following tips are things you should be doing to your computer on a monthly, if not weekly basis and do not involve installing anything that isn’t already on your computer.

Step 1:

Click on “Start” on the lower left hand corner of your Desktop, go to “All Programs”, “Accessories”, “System Tools”, and click on “Disk Cleanup”. When you click on it a box will open that shows a progress bar, let it run until you see this box:

At this stage, you have several different options. You can either click or unclick files you want the computer to delete or you can just leave the defaults on. I recommend just sticking with the default options, Downloaded Program Files, Temporary Internet Files, Recycle Bin, and Temporary Files, unless you know what you’re doing. Afterwards, click on “OK” and click “Yes” when the box stating “Are you sure you want to perform these actions?” appears. The whole process should not take long but it depends on the speed of your computer and the amount of files it needs to delete. “Disk Cleanup” will close when it is done.

Step 2:

Click on “Start” on the lower left hand corner of your Desktop, go to “All Programs”, “Accessories”, “System Tools”, and click on “Disk Defragmenter”. This program organizes the files on your computer so that your computer can find them more easily. This helps the computer run faster while maintaining all your files where you put them. Think of it this way: your computer is like a library, it is full of different types of information that it must keep organized. Now, after weeks of using your computer, the files on your hard drive appear more like a library after finals week, a big mess. The librarian, or computer, knows the books or files are in the library but they have trouble finding them. Disk Defragmenter works by putting everything where it belongs, making it easier for the computer to find files when you want them. This increases the performance of your computer since it uses fewer resources to find things and opens files faster. This may sound confusing but don’t worry, the changes you will be making will not harm your computer unless there is something wrong with the operating system but I’ll talk more about that at a later point in time.

When “Disk Defragmenter” opens up it will list all the drives on your computer. Most people store everything on the C: drive so make sure that is highlighted like so:

Once you have done that you can just click “Defragment”. The screen will change to something that looks like this:

Let the program runs its course without messing with the computer. You can still use the computer but since it will be busy running “Defragmenter” it will run slower so I recommend you leave it alone. It’s easier to do this at a point at which you know you won’t be needing the computer, during dinner, class, while sleeping, etc. The time is takes for the operation to complete depends on the size of your hard drive and the amount of data on it. When it is done, a dialog will pop up at which point you can just close out of the program.

That’s it! You’ve just completed a few steps that help increase your computer’s performance. It wasn’t that bad, was it? If you have any questions, comments, concerns, etc. feel free to leave a comment below.

Stay tuned next week when we will have another How-To guide to help speed up a sluggish computer!

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