Spring cleaning…

In the sense of your pc’s and laptops.  I’m sitting here listening to music on my laptop and it’s not liking it one bit, my CPU is spiking and the music is stuttering, and I now know why.  I’ve let my hard drive get full up and my pc hates it.  So in classic fashion I’m going to write a little post summarising what things you need to do to get your system into shape.

Well, we all know the biggest cause of slowdowns to computers is time, simply put the longer you have a system the slower it gets, but you can solve this.  Firstly, check for malware, adware, and crapware on your system, simply start by going through the add/remove programs menu, and remove stuff you don’t want, or toolbars and other rubbish.  Then scan with an anti-malware software (we recommend Malwarebytes anti-malware).  Next thing to do is to remove any clutter using the disk cleanup tools on windows.  If you don’t run disk cleanup regularly you should get back a few gigabytes of hard drive from that.  You want to keep plenty of free space on your primary system drive, at least 20 gb free (or 15% I believe it is).

Next on the agenda, you could clean up your registry using one of the various programs out there.  Finally you should defrag your system.  I currently use Ultimate Defrag 2008, but you can use whatever, really since it’ll all help in someway.

Not really much but all worth it.  OH, and if you fancy it whip the case off your system and clean out all the dust, your CPU, GFX card and hard drive will be happier for it.  Try and clean the dust out every 3 months, but at the minimum once or twice a year.

~ by Jon on March 29, 2009.