Speed Basics

Edited 4th October 2005

Your computer running a bit slow? Well heres a checklist of things that should speed it right up again.

- Remove viruses, trojans, and spyware (see security sectionsecurity section)
- Uninstall all unnecessary programs, especially large games and such
- Use cleanup programs (i recommend CCleanerwww.ccleaner.com) to purge your caches (temporary storage locations)
- Move large personal files you rarely use to a disk and delete them from the computer
- Delete all unnecessary personal files
- Empty the recycle bin
- Defragment your hard drive (see below)

Youll also find more things you can do in the tipstips and tweakstweaks pages.

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Defragment your hard drive

The space on your hard drive is divided up into a large number of small equally sized locations. Files take up a number of these locations depending on there size. Over time, as files are moved around, gaps of space will appear. When the computer tries to write something to the disk, it might find the space is too small to fit the whole thing, so it has to put the rest of the file elsewhere. This is called fragmentation.

As the computer tries to access the file, it has to jump about all over the place picking up all the pieces.
This slows down your computer.

A de-fragmentation program will rearange the data on your hard drive to put the files back together.
You'll find the windows defragmenter here: start > programs > accessories > system tools > disk defragmenter. On average it should be done about once a month.