A quick and easy way to speed up a slow laptop is to adjust the way Windows looks and moves.  This can quickly speed up how quickly new windows and tabs load up and generally speed up the laptop in any other aspect.

Don’t worry about doing this; you won’t lose any work or make it harder to use Windows it’ll just look a little different that’s all…

Find the system icon on the control panel - the control panel will be in the start menu (where you turn the computer off)

Find the advanced settings for your computer - this may be on a tab for earlier versions of Windows

Select the performance option

Now select "adjust for best performance" and press OK

Now you’ll notice that everything have been simplified on the look of Windows and things move around and open much faster.  If you don’t quite like the (admittedly boring) look of the new performance options then perhaps you could only speed up certain aspects with the “custom” settings.

Virus protection programs like McAfee can really slow Windows down

One thing that slows a computer considerably down is invasive software such as McAfee Virus Checker.

Having virus protection on your laptop is a good thing as it’s quite easy to accidentally download a virus and most new computers are PRE-loaded with McAfee hoping that you will pay for their software.

Now laptop makers such as ACER make a lot of money from this pre-loaded software and they have gotten in trouble for doing this in the past as it’s unfair competition some say.

I highly recommend using a FREE virus checker such as AVAST but before you install it you must remove McAfee as you can have only one antivirus program running at once.

The main reason to remove McAfee (apart from the costs!) is that this program constantly checks your hard disk for viruses making everything very, very slow.  There is no need to constantly check what’s already on your hard drive yet the program is badly designed and can take upto 90% of your processor power doing so, it’s crazy!

To remove McAfee firstly go to the control panel situated on the start menu and then goto “programs and features” or “add/remove programs” shown below:

Click "Programs and Features" or "Add/Remove Programs"

Now all you have to do is find McAfee in the list and remove the program once you have selected it, be careful you don’t remove any other programs!

Now it’s time to install a much faster and free virus protection system call AVAST which I highly recommend (AVG Free is also another good free program you could use).  Click here to setup AVAST and follow the simple instructions to install it on your computer and then you’ll quickly notice how quicker your laptop runs.

Laptop Stands can keep your laptop running smoothly

Inside Laptops there are lots of complicated electrical gizmos that make a lot of heat.  The faster these components run, the more heat they make and if nothing is done to get rid of it then the computer can literally melt itself!

All laptops use lots of mini fans to keep themselves cool, a car engine uses a great giant fan to do the same job.  Now if you place your laptop on a cushion or a pair of baggy clothes then you are in fact BLOCKING the little air vents that are vital to keep everything cool!

What happens when you block the air vents?

1. The hardware slows down all it’s operations to produce less heat
2. The fans go berserk and make a horrid whirling noise
3. You shorten the lifespan of the laptop’s battery

Now purchasing a little laptop rest or stand like the one shown it the picture could save you a lot of over-heating problems in the present and future, also they’re very comfortable and your laptop sticks to them quite well, all-in-all a top buy…

Laptop stands can also help with holding a notebook computer in place; both rests and stands are designed to keep air flowing underneath and at the sides of the laptop at all times.  An added bonus to these devices is not having the heat from the laptop burn your lap as it stands on your legs!

Click here to purchase a Laptop Rest or Laptop Stand

Hard disks need lots of free room to shuffle data around quickly

Your computer uses a hard disk to store all it’s data on which most people know.  What a lot of people don’t realize is that a hard disk is also used to temporarily store information on by programs while they sort tasks out.

Imagine a hard disk is like a room and the data you store on it are objects in the room.  Now to move these object around you need a bit of spare space right?  It’s pretty hard to move a big wardrobe when you have no floor space!  Disk drives are the same although it’s all 1’s and 0’s and things are far more complex (they always are with technology it seems!).

You need to keep 15% of your hard drive free or it’ll take a lot of time trying to find spare space to place your files and do big calculations and processes.

To see how much space you have left on your computer’s hard disk click on the start menu and then select “computer” or “my computer”:

Checking to see how much free space is left on a hard disk

If it’s unclear how much hard drive space is left make sure you look at the “C:” drive or whichever drive is biggest on your computer.

You can get an in depth report of your hard drive by right clicking on it and then selecting “properties”:

You can see a pie chart of the free/used volume on the hard drive's properties window

So have you blocked up your computer?  If so you need to delete unused programs, movies or music off your computer to free up some spare space.

You may have some computer games or large programs taking up a lot of space on your laptop, these can be removed in the “add/remove programs” tab in the control panel.  Check out the McAfee removal process to see how to remove programs from your personal computer.

An added bonus of freeing up 15% of data is that you may hear a lot less “grinding” noise from the computer as it swap around data frantically!

Hard disks get very messy over time

Your hard disk stores data in a strange way – it picks a random position on the hard disk and then keep looking forwards to a spare spot.  Things on your main hard drive constantly get created and deleted leaving empty gaps in the information.  If data need to be stored in those empty gaps then it has to be chopped up into chunks and spread around the empty spaces.  This causes your storage device to become “fragmented” (i.e all over the place).

So is there a way to sort the data on your computer out more uniformed? Yes there is…and it’ll make everything run faster if you do it!

Windows has a great de-fragmentation tool which will solve this problem but before you use it you must have at least 15% of your hard disk space free first.

To set off the defragmentation tool you need to right click on your main hard disk on the “Computer” or “My Computer” tab on the start menu.  Again you can see an example of how to access your hard drive on the other hard disk post. One you right click on the C: drive you need to click “properties”.  From here you should chose the “tools” tab and you’ll find the defrag settings:

Right click on your bigger hard disk to access the defrag settings in the "tools" tab

Now simply select the main hard drive (usually the C: drive) and tell the computer to defragment the disk.  The process may take a while if you’ve never done it, but be patient and don’t run any programs whilst you de-frag.  Perhaps do this overnight if your hard disk looks like it’s very messed up!

This will speed up your computer especially if you play computer games or edit movies and give your computer a rest in reading physical drives.  If you run Windows Vista then this may be already set to happen every week by default, older versions of windows will find major fragmentation happens about once a month if they use the computer a lot.

Dust sneaks its way into Laptops

Dust is a forgotten enemy when it comes to computer maintenance!

No matter what you do (unless you have a high tech lab) you’ll end up with dust all over any room and it gets attracted to computers in two different ways:

1. Static from the monitor attracts it with magnetism
2. Computer fans need to suck in air constantly and dust is always floating around

Why does dust slow a laptop down?

It coats the fans used for cooling the hot components down and they become less effective as air doesn’t flow around the heat sinks as much.  It’s like the hottest parts of your computer are wearing a furry coat!

If anything gets too hot internally in laptops the whole system has to slow itself down using less power (and generating less heat).

If you took the time to take apart the laptop then you can easily remove all of the dust with a soft paper towel or cotton bud, you may want a professional to do this if you are unsure or worried about taking your laptop apart!  It shouldn’t cost more than £5 ($8) so don’t let a computer technician rip you off.

An added bonus of removing the dust on fans/heat-sinks is that the fans can run at a much slower speed using less power and more importantly make a lot less annoying whirring noise.

Switching the Windows Background to black has two advantages

You may have a family photo or a scenic image as your background on your Windows desktop but did you know that you laptop experience would be vastly improved if you just changed it to pure black?

Windows has to constanly remember the pixels used for you background image, placing a full size image from a digital camera makes it redraw the background image after anything passes over it which slows things down.  The less layers Windows has to cope with the faster it can run and the less precious memory it’ll need.

Having a complex image as your desktop background can slow down your reading as well as your physical computer.  The black text and image icons used for programs and folders can get lost in the image and you can find yourself frantically searching for the icon you want to click on.  The contrast of the icons against the image is to blame for this, white on black or vice versa is the highest contrast you can ever achieve.

Tip: If you are trying to find an icon in a sea of icons then keep pressing the first letter of that icon and Windows will eventually highlight it.  If you wanted to find a folder named “Holiday Snaps” the press ‘H‘ on the keyboard for example.

If you change the background to black and decide it’s not for you then it can be quickly changed back, if you MUST use an image from a digital camera as the background try making it smaller so it fits only 50% of the screen.

Changing the background is simple, start by minimalising all your windows and then right clicking on the desktop:

Right click on the desktop and chose "Properties"

Then chose background image “none”, select black and press “Apply”:

Remove any background image and change it to pure black

That’s it, now notice how smoothly you can use Windows compared to before, you could use a very dark orage or blue if the black seems a bit depressing!  Get more shades on the “other” option in the background properties.

Avoid pre-loading useless programs

Over time you’ll find that many programs that you use pre-load themselves when Windows starts so you can use them faster.  When you turn on your laptop you may have to wait a fair few minutes until you can even start surfing the internet which can be very frustrating!

Even worse is that these programs are on standby whether you want to use them or not and they take up your computer’s memory.  The computer’s memory is used as a quick swapping place for calculations, if lots of memory is free then lots of programs can use the date in their quickly and be fast running.  If the memory starts getting jammed then the hard disk is used as a substitute and it’s about ten times slower at doing the same job.

Basically you want as few programs as possible running on your laptop to make it the fastest it can be!

So how do well stop these programs pre-loading themselves?  Well it’s very hard for me to tell you as each program is different and has different ways of changing it’s settings.

Let’s take MSN Messenger (A.K.A Live Messenger) for an example, I see that messaging program load itself up on MANY laptops if the laptop user wanted it or not:

Go to "Tools" and then "Options"

Find the option to stop Messenger automatically loading up when Windows starts

Now most programs will have similar settings to MSN Messenger Live.  You usually need to go in to the “options” or “preferences” tab, find the “general” or “settings” tab and then tell that program to think twice if it’s going to jam up things when you start up Windows!

The tiny icons in the bottom right hand side of the screen show what’s running at any given time so this is your first clue of what to change the automatic settings with.

Good luck in killing each program, remember you can start up any program just as well by finding it in the “programs” section of your “Start Menu” (bottom left icon) and it may take an extra 10-20 seconds to load up than usual, that’s all!

Does your desktop look something like this? You're slowing the whole system down!

It’s easy to get a bit lazy when it comes to sorting your files out on your desktop.  Over a period of times you may have images, shortcuts, folders and web-pages scattered all over the place when you switch your computer on.

Windows Desktop is like a permanently open folder and every icon on the desktop takes up vital computer memory.  This mean that having your desktop cluttered not only makes it hard to spot a specific file it also drags the general speed down of Windows Explorer.

How do you store your files neatly and efficiently?

Simple, make lots of folders!  Make a folder for your images (or use the on in your documents folder), make a folder for your music, another one for your word documents etc. etc. and throw all the files into the right folder.

If you are very lazy then you could just throw all the icons into a folder called “junk” for example!

You may want to leave the icons for your most used programs, the dustbin and your internet browser on the desktop for ease of access.

Internet Explorer is a slow and un-friendly way to browse the Internet

Are you still using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to browse the Internet?

Internet Explorer is pre-loaded onto all versions of Windows and many people never switch away from it or know an alternative even exsists!

The browser is well known to display many websites incorrectly; you will have a much better online experience with another browser (another program to read the Internet’s many webpages).

Another bad point about IE (there are many!) is the amount of computer memory it uses plus it displays new websites in whole new windows creating IE clones all over the place.

If you Google the term “IE problems” then you get an incredible 722 MILLION results!

So what browser should you use instead?  It only takes about 5-10 minutes to download and set up a brand new web-browser on your laptop so don’t be put of making the effort to do so.

Firefox is the most widely used browser on the Internet today and the best too

There is one clear winner when it comes to choosing the right surfing software; the  top Internet program called Mozilla Firefox.

It uses significantly less RAM which speeds up your laptop and it has add-ons, tabbed browsing and a zoom function if you find it hard to read small text.

Some add-ons can save you time, one add-on can control your favourite music player (such as itunes) fom the bottom of the web-browser meaning that you don’t have to switch windows to change the track or volume.

Tip: Tabbed browsing allows you to have multiple webpages on the same broswer window, press “CTRL + T” to open a new tab and “CTRL + W” to close them.  These save time by not needing to load up a new window each time you want another web-page open at the same time plus it saves on computer memory too!

Enough of me talking about Firefox, you should go and install it right now: here’s the link to the official download page

If you already have Firefox then you may want to make sure you have the latest version, version 3 is slightly quicker than version 2.  Not happy with Firefox? Try Google’s great new browser which is still currently under development called Google Chrome, it has a few bugs at the moment but may soon become the best ever browser and it’s the fastest yet.