Faster Computer.?

Question

What is a way to make a computer faster without buying anything special for it?

Answer 1

Run your disk defragmenter, that will make the computer access your files faster. Also, run msconfig and remove any unnecessary programs from your start up. You probably have a bunch of junk that starts up when you turn on your computer.

Answer 2

What do you mean by faster? What do you mean by special? These are arbitrary or ambiguous. Less is more regarding software. The less you have running on your computer, the faster the computer will run. The less you have on your hard drive, the less searching your computer has to do to find what it wants. The smaller the programs, the faster the computer runs. Defrag is a good start.
The cheapest hardware upgrade has traditionally been memory. If your system is old enough, that will not be so cheap compared to other upgrades. The next cheapest is the processor. There is a limit to how fast a processor your motherboard will support. The next upgrade is the motherboard, processor and memory. Once you have gone that far, it is time to think about a completely new system. Nothing cheap. Just try to keep your filing system clean. Don't run more programs than necessary. Keep out spyware and viruses. Keep programs as small and simple as possible. Forget about the Internet when the programs required to access it become too complicated for your system to run well...it will happen. That is part of why I got another computer. The other reason is that my printer broke. Cost too much to repair. Cheaper to get another computer...sad.

Answer 3

There are a few things you can do.

Defragment:
To defragment your computer restart it and as soon as it starts up begin pressing F8 and holding it for a second, then releasing it. Keep doing it until you get a menu that will allow you to start up in safe mode. When your computer starts up go into Control Panel > Display > Screen Saver and turn yours off. If your screen saver pops up or any other program is opened during the defragmentation process it will restart itself. Now you go to Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter. Start it up and walk away for a while. It's best to do this at night or before you go to work. The process takes a while. Incase you don't know, when you defragment a disk drive it puts everything into a neat order. While you use your computer over the months data is thrown all over your drive so it takes longer for the computer to access.

Another way to make it way faster is to upgrade your RAM. You can buy RAM pretty cheap in Best Buy and it's really easy to install. Begin by opening your computer up. You should see a breadboard with all kinds of devices connected to it. This is called the motherboard. You will see 2 or 3 slots with clips holding in the RAM cards. You will want to read the text on these cards and determine how much it is. You want the highest amount of RAM to be in the first slot and the lowest in the last slot. Once you have your new RAM all clipped in start up your PC. If you get a memory error this is completely normal so ignore it.

NOTE: It's important to unplug the power from your PC before doing anything inside of it. You should also work on your computer in a pretty static free environment which means you DO NOT EVER work on it on the carpet. You should also avoid any magnetic tools.

Answer 4

Start with the basic maintainence on your system before downloading third party software.

this simple guide will assit you

http://www.pctechguide.com/tutorials/hdd...

Make sure your windows updates are uptodate, and also your
anti-virus is updated and run a full scan of your system.

Tune up your start up files (faster loading system)
Go to Start>Run and in the Run dialog box type in 'msconfig' and hit Enter.
System Configuration Utility will pop up choose the Startup tab.

Click on that tab and you will see the list of what runs at startup.
Use this site to determine whats safe to uncheck

type in search box exactly how it appears in msconfig start up

http://www.sysinfo.org/startuplist.php.....

and keep it on your favorites for future ref as when you install new software and downloads check msconfig again to make sure no more items have been added to start up.

I used to run my PC with 5 things on start up that included firewall and antivirus...

its time consuming, but gets easier if you run things regularly.

The next thing would be to increase RAM it can be quite inexpensive and easy to install. and you don't have to max it out if its outside your budget.

http://www.crucial.com/
choose country and use the advisor it will scan you system and tell you what you have and the type of ram to buy and max capacity.

you can buy from Crucial or take the info and look elsewhere.

Good Luck

Answer 5

If you have Windows XP, here's a list of 'tweaks' I have put together:

First right-click My Computer and go to:
Properties>Advanced>Performance>Settings
Select radio button for best performance
This will take away the blue and green look to XP and give it the old grey windows look but it highly reduces the demand on your video card.
Next, from the same window in Properties>Advanced>Performance>Settings, the new window open should say performance options.
Click the advanced tab and then click change under vitrual memory. Windows adjusts the size of the page file as needed but it has a limit on min and max size. choose a custom size and make both of them the max size. You can make it larger than it was if you like. If it was 1500 MB min and 3000 MB max, it is o.k. to make both 4000 MB as long as your system has plenty of hard drive space. This tweak will keep windows from slowing down while it tries to adjust the size of the page file.
Click O.K. on all windows and the changes will take effect after the next restart. If you have more than one hard drive I recommend using no page file on your C; drive and put one on the other drive instead. This will make it even faster for your system to access. However, if you just have one physical hard drive that is partitioned, then don’t bother.

Next run "services.msc" from the run box in the start menu.
Double-click and disable the following at your discretion:
Error reporting- does nothing for you, just helps Micro$oft
indexing service- on the rare occasion that you are using the search function, it will make it a little faster, the rest of the time it is constantly indexing your system and slowing it down
Themes- you know what they are, keep 'em if ya want 'em
Help and support- the "browser" that pops up when you hit F1 key
there are plenty more in there that are unnecessary and slowing down your system, but these are the ones that are completely safe for everyone to disable. The rest depend on the user and their particular system.

Also in the Properties menu for My Computer:
on the system restore tab- you can disable this feature to speed up your system but the windows system restore feature will not be available. When you really need to use it, it hardly ever works. Most of the time you will get half way through the restore and an error pops up telling you that your system can not be restored to that date/time.
It’s up to you, but just make sure you have anti-virus running and regularly back up your system. When its time to do a restore your better off doing it the old fashion way with the CD.

Run MSCONFIG from the run box. Uncheck anything that you are ABSOLUTLY sure does not need to be running every time your system restarts.
for the rest, if I don’t know, I usually Google the file name with the *.exe and get a good idea if it needs to be running.

Answer 6

DON'T GET A DELL. Get a friend to build you a computer. You can build one 2 to 3 times as fast for half the price, no joking. Dell is a ripoff place. Only there lowest and highest end computers are worth the price!

Answer 7

Actually installing a antivirus almost always slows down your computer to have the fasterst virus free copmuter you would have to stay away from the internet, otherwise you have to live with a slow computer.

Answer 8

Nothing will make it remarkably faster by not upgrading memory or CPU.

Answer 9

Nothing without spending money.More memory is the best way to go.

Answer 10

You can download free spyware romver, and free antiviruses. Clean out all of your cookies and cache