How to Make Your PC as Fast as the Day you Bought It

Does your computer suck? It’s probably your fault!

One of the most frustrating things in life is a slow computer.

Every few years, we buy an expensive new PC and love how fast it starts up, runs programs, and loads web sites.  Inevitably, though it starts to slow down, until eventually we are pulling our hair out waiting for it to do routine tasks.

Why is this? It turns out the answer is actually quite simple and you don’t even need to be “technical” to understand the causes and solutions.

The good news, it’s not the computer hardware that’s the problem.  In most cases the hardware you have is perfectly capable of being restored to its original glory and kept in fast running condition with minimal effort.

Rather, the problem lies with changes that occur to the PC’s software. The 2 most common causes of slowdown (along with easy solutions) are:

The author goes on to say registry errors and spyware and viruses are the two main causes of slowdown — and he’s right — but I don’t like the recommendations so here are mine…

I’ve actually been thinking about this alot lately. I optimized the computer of one of my favorite clients on Friday — Ann Renard of Renards Cheese in Sturgeon Bay. As I explained to Ann, for most people, the best day with their computer is the first one and unless you take a couple of basic steps to assure it will continue to perform, it will get worse and worse every day. Here’s what we did to get her a ‘new’ computer…

First, we went to Crucial.com, downloaded the memory scanner and found we could max out her memory for less than $90. She had been sold a computer with only 1Gb of memory which is well above the Microsoft minimums but not very practical in the real world…

Next, I used RevoUninstaller to delete the cheesy [I guess I actually meant that pun] antispam and antivirus apps that had been installed and replaced them with Microsoft Security Essentials. I figure Microsoft causes all the security problems, why not let them fix them? Seriously, I have found MSE does a great job with minimum system interference — something I can say about Symantec [Norton] or McAfee tools. You can download it here…

Finally, we downloaded and installed TuneUp Utilities. It’s the only utility that I purchase and resubscribe to year after year. We did the analysis and ran all the optimizers and now her computer is running great. TuneUp Utilities will continue to run in the background with minimal interference and keep her computer in great shape…

That’s it. For the paltry price of less than $150, Ann has a ‘new’ computer that will continue to run in tip top shape for the foreseeable future. For the record, I would have charged her $70 to do this work, but she had given me a great ‘care package’ of some of their new cheese products and I wanted to reciprocate. The approach that I took and recommend — more memory + TuneUp Utilities + Microsoft Security Essentials — is a winner that you can deploy on your own! Of course, if all of this was Greek to you, you’ll want to give me a call so I can do it for you…

As a bonus for having read this far, I’m sharing my ‘top tools’ mindmap with you — it’s a list of mostly free resources that I use and recommend. TuneUp Utilities is the only one with a cost attached. You can download Soluto at http://soluto.com and all the rest can be downloaded at http://ninite.com…

Zoom in with the plus sign… :-D