10 Tips to Speed Up Your PC

I recently visited a friend who complained that his PC was running slowly. (I often run into this when I'm over a friend's house.) It was a Windows 7 machine, and indeed it was crawling. Usually the person has become a victim of some drive-by installation, a result of clicking on some button on a webpage. Often when you install one program that you do want, you'll be hit with another you don't want. And very often that's a browser toolbar, notorious for slowing down browsing. Another major culprit is fake system speedup software.

But software isn't the only issue affecting PC speed. Thankfully, Windows offers tools that help you easily see how fast or slow your hardware components are. If you right-click on Computer and choose Properties. Here along with your Windows version and hardware, you'll see a Windows Experience rating. Hardware experts will pooh-pooh this test's ability to precisely measure system performance, but it can at least show you if there's a particular system component that's holding back your system speed.

Windows Experience rates each component out of a score of a possible max of 7.9. For example, on my work laptop, I was surprised to note that, while my 8GB of RAM and decent CPU got good scores of over 7, but my hard drive was a less impressive 5.9. And the rating page makes it easy to find the weakest link in your hardware chain, since the overall score is simply the lowest of your components, and that score is highlighted. That way, it's easy to see which component you should upgrade to get the biggest speed improvement.

Whether or not you need to add or replace hardware to get a faster running computer, check out my suggestions below for some of the best ways to get your PC back in sprinting condition.

1. Uninstall unwanted software.

PCs often come preloaded with software you'll never use. And what's worse, some of these programs run background processes at startup even though you're not using them. To get rid of all this dreck, open Control Panels' Programs and Features page, hunt trough the list of installed software, and uninstall those that are obviously not desirable, while being careful to leave stuff your system and hardware needs, things whose Publisher is listed as PC maker's name, a peripheral's company name, or Microsoft. Unfortunately, Microsoft removed the column showing how often you use programs in this list.

Often the culprit slowing down your PC will be something actually claiming to clean or speed up your PC. The friend I was helping with his slow computer had even paid one of these software makers—for a program that only continued to slow down the computer. To delegate the task of finding out which programs you probably don't want or need, you could try a third-party utility called PC Decrapifier. It's free for non-commercial use.

2. Disable startup programs.

This one is for slightly braver users. Click on the Start button and type msconfig. The System Configuration dialog will pop up. Switch to its Services tab, hunt down entries with dubious names from dubious sources. Leave anything from Microsoft, your PC maker, or well-known software sources like Apple or Google. Again, those fake speed-up utilities are good candidate for unchecking in this list. You could also uncheck any software from reliable sources that you just don't need running all the time. For example, you don't really need to run Adobe Reader at startup—you can just run it when you actually need to view a PDF. Switch to MSConfig's Startup tab and do the same. Listed here will likely be more familiar application names, and the Manufacturer column makes the software's source clear. Changing anything in System Configuration will require a reboot to take effect.

3. Run Disk Cleanup.

Windows includes a built-in disk de-cluttering tool: Disk Cleanup. This scans your system for unnecessary large files such as program installers, temporary Internet files, log files and more. On my system, the largest amount of data by far was taken up by Temporary File—2.5GB—that could mean the difference between a sluggish and a peppy PC. The folks behind the PC TuneUp utilities have posted a good case for disk space affecting performance, even calling it the #1 Performance Killer!

4. Run Third-Party cleanup software.

There are a whole lot of third-party programs out there offering to speed up and clean up your PC. My advice: Stay as far away from those as you can, unless you've read a review of the software in a reliable source like PCMag, Cnet, or PCWorld. If the review is from a source you haven't heard of, it's likely worthless promotion. Some good third-party programs designed to speed up your PC include Ashampoo WinOptimizer 10, SlimCleaner 4 and TuneUp Utilities 2013. One old reliable used by system administrators for years is the free CCleaner utility. This offers several panels for cleaning out unneeded Windows and application files, registry entries, and tools. The registry is where Windows stores program and system settings. If you uninstall programs, the registry can get corrupted and contain unneeded entries, which CCleaner can remove.

5. Run Action Center's Troubleshooter.

Action Center is represented by a flag icon in your PC's system tray—those small icons at the end of the taskbar. You click that or just type Action Center in the Start button's search box. Action Center looks at error reports for errors you've encountered, and check s for soultions. It can identify out-of-date hardware drivers and software updates that may speed up your PC. From the Action Center control panel, drop down the Maintenance section, and click the Check for solutions link.

6. Clean Out Malware.

This could be the most common reason for PCs slowing down. You went to a website, clicked a dubious Install button, and it was all downhill from there. Today's malware can be very devious in using techniques to evade being cleaned out. The best thing for this is to run a PC anti-malware utility, like those included with Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, Norton 360, Webroot SecureAnywhere, or Bitdefender Antivirus Plus. In difficult cases, you may need to run a utility that starts at boot-up.

7. Install More RAM.

They say that you can never be too rich or too thin, and we might add that you can never have too much RAM. It's particularly important if you run multiple applications at the same time, do any video editing, or PC gaming. A friend's system had 2GB installed, but even 32-bit Windows can use 4GB. Since you can get a 4GB stick of DDR3 memory for $46, it makes a lot of sense to upgrade. For 64-bit versions of Windows, you'll want at least 4GB, while 6GB or 8GB are better options.

The computer I'm working on right now is using 4.14GB of RAM, as shown in the Task Manager's Performance tab (you can get their easily by hitting Ctrl-Shift-Esc). More memory means less time-consuming accesses to your hard drive, and therefore better performance. The major memory module vendors such as Corsair, Crucial, and Kingston all offer Web tools that help you identify the exact type of memory cards your PC requires. Here's a great article to show you how to add RAM.

8. Install a bigger, faster hard drive.

Just as with RAM, your PC needs storage headroom, with Windows itself and so many application programs creating so many temporary files. If you have 85 percent of your hard drive full, you should probably upgrade. An even faster choice would be an SDD, and you can now get one with 120GB for just under $100. One good strategy is to use the SSD for Windows and conventional hard drives for applications and data. Our Matthew Murray has an excellent video tutorial on how to install a hard drive to take you through the process.

9. Upgrade to Windows 8.

If startup time is your concern, I can offer no better advice than to upgrade to Windows 8. Yes, the interface takes some getting used to, but really, the tech press, PCMag included, have overstated the usability aspect of Microsoft's new desktop OS. I actually have grown to far prefer using Windows 8 that I've set up to dual-boot between Windows 7 and 8; everything just seems faster, and that's using a mouse and keyboard. Touch-screen users will see additional benefits.

10. Defragment your hard drive.

Your disk stores a file's data in one or more chunks of space on the physical disk, regardless of whether the space is contiguous. Defragging tidies everything up and blocks a program's bits together so that the reader heads don't have to shuttle back and forth to read a whole executable or data file. While this is less of a problem with today's huge hard drives and copious RAM, a slow system can still benefit from defragmenting the