Upgrade your memory; this is one of the easiest ways to speed up your computer. As time progresses, programs get advanced and their memory needs will be exponentially greater than what previous incarnations would have required of your computer perhaps some months ago. When memory prices are as cheap as they are today, it is quite elementary to see that all you need to do to get yourself a quicker computer that can run both faster and your programs more reliably is to just pop over to a local dealer and upgrade your Random Access Memory (RAM).
Pop in a few gigs of the stuff (I recommend a total upgrade, because memory speeds and bandwidths are also improved and there might be some conflict issues if you decide to mix and match old and new RAM) and you will see an almost immense difference in speed, especially with some intensive programs. Your computer will slow down less and you will notice less hangs in the system when using more than one program. A good multi tasker knows that to keep the PC fast and happy while running multiple programs, you need loads of memory. Another thing you can do is to actually defragment the hard disk, as a disk laden with fragmented data will be the bane of any Operating System. Windows will have to go through the paces of finding the fragmented files and piecing them together whenever it needs to launch a program.
A disk gets fragmented over time and this is something natural and expected when it comes to computers, so the good thing to do is to defrag the disk every few weeks. No matter how big your hard disk is, just leave the process overnight, or when you are away from the computer. The good thing about this is that Windows has included the defrag software for free within your accessories and you can use it any time. This is a cheap and simple way for you to speed up and maintain your computer's original performance. Another way is to do simple maintenance on the computer every once in a while. Get rid of unnecessary start up programs. Get rid of background programs that you are not using that is just eating away at your system memory.
Get rid of large files just sitting on your hard disk and not doing anything. This is just some of the scheduled maintenance that everyone should be doing for their PC. Check the integrity of your registry; conflicts and problems within the registry is one of the major reasons why computers get slow, as Windows has trouble decoding the command lines and values due to orphaned and bad keys within the registry. The good news is that you can download a free registry cleaner and speed up your computer almost instantly. It cleans the registry and gets rid of any and all junk on the system to ensure that clutter is removed and that the OS can breathe. Once that happens, you will see a change in the performance.
