Your computer has slowed down and you are getting irritated with it. You wish it were a little faster. You are not in mood to call the technician. Here are a couple of tricks that you might want to try out to speed up your PC.

Check the computer hard disk
Go to My Computer and right click on the hard disk icon. Then select Properties and then Tools. You will find an option to defragment your hard disk and another to check for errors. Try to do both. Quite often defragmenting of the disk will speed up your computer, especially so if you have not done it before. You could find a difference immediately by doing it. Defragmenting helps rearrange files in a more organized way. In other words the contents of the disk are stored closer together and in a contiguous manner. Defragmentation reduces fragmentation in file systems. A large number of files contribute to fragmentation leading to performance loss. Defragmentation attempts to reduce these problems. Note that the use of disk defragmentation is not recommended on solid-state drives (SSD), as it may reduce the lifespan of the drive (A solid-state drive (SSD) is a data storage device that uses solid-state-memory to store data)

The other thing is to check for errors on the disk. Checking for errors can warn you of trouble and possible problems. With Windows Vista you will also see an option to run an automatic back up which is good thing to do.

Disk Cleanup
Click the Start Button then select Accessories, then System Tools. You will see the option for Disk Cleanup. It is time to remove a bit of clutter. You will see various boxes to delete files. You can remove temporary files, very old files, old files not required now after an upgrade and files created by the previous error checking. Doing this involves very little risk, so go ahead and let the program clear out unnecessary mess that is lying in the disk.

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