Speed Up Your Slow Laptop

Laptop performance, or shall I say lack of performance can be incredibly frustrating. You remember when you first bought your laptop. It zipped along like a breeze, programs started almost instantly it seemed. What happened? How can you fix it?

Def-ragging

If you don’t know what def-ragging is you are not alone, a lot of people have no idea what def-ragging is or how greatly it can benefit them. This simple task can speed up performance significantly.

Def-ragging is the process of reorganizing how your hard drive stores things. When you first purchased your laptop everything was nice and tidy. This is mostly because there was almost nothing on it. The blocks of data were empty. As time goes by and you add more and more programs, these blocks get a bit messy and begin to be spread all about your hard disk. Def-ragging pulls all of related blocks together so when it needs information it doesn’t have to look too hard.


Empty Your Garbage

This one is pretty simple. I am not sure why but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people tell me they had no space left on their hard drives only to discover completely full recycle bins! You don’t forget to take out your garbage at home (hopefully) so why forget to empty your laptops garbage can?
Remove Temp Files

Your browser and your operating system store many files without you knowing about them. These are known as temporary files. These temporary files are not meant to be kept very long by your computer but often are.

Kill Ad-ware & Spy-ware

Spy-ware and ad-ware are not only major annoyances they are taking up valuable space and computer resources. There are many free programs available that will get rid of these unwanted pesks.

Save Some Space

If my laptop begins to perform sluggishly the first thing I do is take a look at the programs I have installed. I remove anything that I do not use regularly. This will clean up a lot space. A full hard drive will perform very slowly. I always keep at least 500 megabytes of space available at the bare minimum.

Still Slow?

So if you’ve performed all of the steps above and your laptop is still slow? You may want to clean your registry. I will give a warning however before doing this. Be VERY careful when doing anything to your registry. One slight mistake can render your laptop much slower than before, or worse. There are a lot of registry cleaning software programs that will do all the dirty work for you without the risk of breaking anything.


John Kimble takes his computing seriously, as should you. He has written many articles related to computers and technology over the years. Take a quick trip to his site about electric knife sharpeners and the Accusharp knife sharpener it will totally blow you away and completely change the way you think about knife sharpeners.