Speeding up your computer…. (Part 4 of 4)

Speeding up your computer…. (Part 4 of 4)

This month we finalise the series in which we have reviewed various ways that you can speed up your computer, we have already covered identifying and replacing the hardware in your computer and this month we will look at the software options you can use to get the most out of your computer.

Over the past few months we have learned that the more programs you have open, the more RAM you need and that an easy way to speed up your computer is to increase the amount of RAM your computer has inside. However, the opposite is also true, i.e. if you reduce the number of programs that you use, the less RAM you need to work effectively.

Nowadays there are all sorts of programs that run in the “background” mostly, silently eating up RAM that you could be using for other things. Skype is a particularly greedy program for example. You can see many of the background use programs by clicking on the little arrow (on Windows 10) in the bottom right of the task bar, it will display a list of things that are running on your computer – for example antivirus.

The more of these programs that you are able to remove, the more RAM you will free up for use with the programs that you want to use. So using the “uninstall a program” option on the Control Panel, you can slowly and carefully remove any programs that you know you no longer use. Obviously, you shouldn’t remove important programs like your antivirus, but if you see Skype there or maybe an old mobile phone syncronisation program or something else that you know you no longer use then remove it and free up the RAM.

Another way to improve your computers performance is to use the Performance Options within Windows. Click the start button and type “Adjust the appearance and performance”. This will open the performance options menu. In the visual effects tab, either just select “adjust for best performance” or manually turn off the options you can live without, and when you’re done click on the OK button to save your settings.

As I mentioned in a previous article, running a disk cleanup can help to optimise your computer, and you can run this tool easily. Click the start button and type “disk clean up”, choose your C drive and click on the OK button to clean up your drive.