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How to Speed Up a Slow Computer

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There are many tools available that can help you to speed up your hard drive and make your computer run faster, even as fast as it did before. However, a word of warning - do not do anything until you backup your most important data first. When you are working with computer programs, anything is liable to happen. So protect yourself and your data by backing it up first. This way if you were to lose your information, you could easily get it back. Now let's talk about some of the tools you can use to help speed up your PC:

• Clean hard drive: It is best to get rid of many programs you don't use anymore. You would be surprised to find how many programs that are installed on your PC that is not even necessary or important to have. You are wasting space and memory. To get rid of these programs just go to the Control Panel. Then click Add or Remove Programs. Once the window pops up, scroll through the list until you find the program you don't need or use. Click to highlight the program and click the Remove button. Then just follow the prompts that come up. You may need to reboot your PC at this point. Do so if suggested.
• Wasted space cleaning: As soon as you get rid of those unwanted programs, you may find that there may be some residue left in those spaces. At this time it would be a good idea to run XP's Disk Cleanup tool. You can run this program by going to My computer. Then right-click on Local Disk. Click Properties. At the next screen, look for the General tab. Now click Disk Cleanup. Disk Cleanup will scan your hard drive and find any and all space that can be freed. Click on the check boxes of files you want to get rid of that is in the Files to Delete window. Once you have done this click OK.
• Defrag your hard drive: One thing that can really slow down a PC is when the hard drive can become fragmented. This is when all the files on the hard drive are scattered every which way. In order to prevent this, you need to run the defrag program that XP provides. You do this by going to My Computer. Then select Local Disk with your right mouse button. Then click Properties. Select the Tools tab and click Defragment Now. The Disk Defragmenter opens showing you a list of hard drives in your machine. Pick the hard drive you want defragged and click Defragment.
• Remove Autostart programs: to help save on space and on memory when booting, get rid of those programs that start automatically on boot. You can get rid of these programs by clicking Start then click Run. Next you will type in Msconfig. Then either click or press Enter. When the window opens click the Startup tab. Here will be a list of programs that start when you boot the PC. Look at each item and remove the check so that program will not run. Click Apply and reboot your PC. You'll be surprised at how doing this will you're your PC boot faster and run quicker.
• Clean out email inbox: Believe it or not, if you use Outlook Express and you keep all your old email, even deleted email is kept; this will eventually slow down your system. You see when you load Outlook Express for the first time, all your message folders get loaded in memory and stay there. This makes accessing the folders easier and faster. But if you have too many emails in there, that will take up a large chunk of memory. So every so often delete old email you don't want and clear your junk and deleted files folder as well.

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