Messedover’s Guide to Help Tune Up an Old PC for the Layman

[messedover]

Messedover’s Guide to Help Tune Up an Old PC for the Layman

This article is about gaining a little speed for the average person that doesn’t have a clue of why their PC is running so slow, or having too many errors. This is for MS windows only and not a guarantee if there are too many registry errors, the only cure may be a fresh install of the OS.

1. First things first, let’s get rid of the “bloat”. Delete all things that are not necessary such as e-mails, old favorites and any other junk (Don’t forget to empty the recycle bin). Then go to “My Computer”, “add or remove programs”, and let the list populate. Uninstall any old games or programs you never use. If by chance you have an old virus protection (such as McAfee) that expired, uninstall it, there are free ones that are pretty good, we’ll get to that later. Now unless you are an AOL user, if the computer came with all this AOL junk, uninstall anything that has AOL on it. Now if it says you need to restart, you can or click on restart later.
2. Now clear your temporary files, cookies and history. Go to “Control Panel “, “Network and internet connections” then “ internet options “ to do this.
3. Defragment your files. OK, this is the one that will take a while, if you haven’t done it in a long time or not at all. Go to “Control Panel”, “performance and maintenance”, then to, “rearrange items on your hard disk to make programs run faster”, to do this. Click on defragment, then go shopping or something, but you can do the next step.
4. Most older PCs have 512 RAM or even less, I find that increasing the virtual memory helps big time. To do this, once again go to “Control Panel”, “performance and maintenance”, then “system”. When the window pops up click on advanced. Then click on the settings tab under performance, then click advanced again. Click on the change tab under virtual memory and increase it to the maximum. Click on set then OK. Restart your computer if it has finished defragging and you are done.
5. If you do not have an antivirus software installed, go to AVG and install the free version and then run it. Also do the same with Spybot Search and Destroy. If you have any spyware, adware or viruses, they can cause you to run slow too. There is good info on the forum for this. http://www.yourpcforums.org/vbforum/...read.php?t=935