A few ideas to make your computer run faster.

Uninstall unwanted programs.

Think about what you would want to keep from your computer if you were buying a new one. This concentrates the mind wonderfully. You will find that you’ll probably only want to keep a few programs and the rest is photos and music files. So, most of the other stuff on your computer is junk. So start here. Go to Start > Control Panel > Programs > Uninstall a Program. Have a look through the programs and right click “Uninstall” any of those you don’t need any more. You’ll find a lot of programs in there that you never knew you had.

Apple is a company I find installs all sorts of extra junk with their downloads. If you’ve installed iTunes you’ll probably have 5 others that came with it. The same for Adobe – always installing some nonsense on your PC - they only have one good program and they bought that from someone else.

Anyway, uninstall what you don’t need and you’ve saved a whole heap of resources.

Clean up your start up folder.

When you switch your computer on, it loads the BIOS and then Windows. Windows looks in the Startup folder to see what programs to boot up first. These are programs that you want to have access to as soon as possible. Except that’s not always the case….

Full of their own self importance and the importance of the software they have created, programmers instruct their software to write themselves into the Startup folder and boot up as soon as the Operating System is loaded.

Every program in that startup folder is going to take time to open. If you’ve got 10 in there, it’s no surprise you have time for a wash a change from when you switched your computer on until the time it’s ready to do any work.

Most of them do not need to be opened straight away. iTunes for instance. Other culprits are printing software like Epson, Google, the dreaded Adobe, mobile phone software such as Nokia, and web cam software. They can all start when you want to use them. They don’t need to be open by default.

So, go to Start > Run and type 'msconfig' then click OK. This will open the System Configuration Utility window. Click the Startup tab then un-check the boxes next to any programs that you don't want to run automatically when Windows starts. I suggest being fairly ruthless. As a rule of thumb, look in the Command column. If it starts with  “c:\Windows” leave it alone. Leave anything from Intel, your computer manufacturer – like Dell, or generally Microsoft. Everything else is fair game. Just untick it.

The consequences of getting it wrong aren’t that drastic if you’re half competent with a computer. Critical system processes aren’t usually accessible from the startup folder, anyway. If you do get any problems open Windows in Safe mode and tick all the boxes in the startup folder again.

This will certainly speed up your computer from boot up.

These 2 suggestions alone should speed up your computer. Go and do them today and then look out for part 2 tomorrow.