The longer you use your PC, the slower it gets.
It’s an unfortunate fact of life that installing software in Windows can slow your system down. Many programs set themselves up to run when your PC boots, adding time to your boot cycle and taking up vital memory space.
In addition, deleted programs may not remove themselves cleanly from your registry, leaving behind incomplete entries, redundant instructions, and other garbage that slows down processing speeds. Eventually, if left unchecked, the buildup of installed and badly uninstalled programs can grind even the most high-end PCs to a virtual halt.
Check Your System Tray
When I decide to take steps to make my computer faster, the first thing I do is take a long, hard look at my system tray. By default, it’s a collection of icons in the bottom right hand side of the screen.
The system tray contains icons for every program currently running on a system, and every one of those programs is taking up some small amount of system resources.
The first thing I do to restore my system’s speed is look through these icons, identifying any program that shouldn’t be resident in memory and terminating it. More than once, I’ve discovered programs I thought were long deleted, still present in my startup cycle and still slowing my computer down.
Check your Task Manager
While paring down the contents of my system tray will certainly make my computer faster, there are other, more carefully hidden programs that may be taking up system memory.
Pressing Ctrl-Alt-Delete brings up a menu that allows access to the Task Manager, a program that monitors processes running on a system.
I like the Task Manager in particular because it not only shows me every single program resident in memory, it also details exactly how much system resources each is taking up, allowing me to quickly spot the memory hogs which may be contributing most to my system’s speed problems. Shutting down unwanted or redundant processes will free up available memory and CPU cycles, increasing speeds across the board.
Caution
Before I shut down any unidentified process or program, I first check the file name out to make sure it isn’t something vital to Windows.
After all, I can’t make my computer faster if I accidentally shut it down by closing an important process. Googling the file names listed in the task manager is a good way to learn what each program does, and whether it’s an important part of my operating system or some third-party program I can safely kill.
If you find yourself unsure of the identity of one of these programs when optimizing your own system, you’re probably best off leaving the process alone until you can find out more about it, as shutting down the wrong program at the wrong time can lead to loss of data, system instability, or other problems.
