Wednesday, April 16, 2008

3 Tips to Speed Up Your Laptop

Its a bummer when your laptop is running sluggishly and applications take forever to load. It could be that your laptop is old, or maybe the system is just being bogged down. Luckily, there are several ways to help get your laptop back up to speed that dont require taking it to the laptop repair shop down the street where the guy charges you some exorbitant fee. Here are a few tips to help you speed up your laptop.

1. Add more RAM - Adding more RAM is usually the first-choice option for speeding up a computer. More RAM allows you to run more programs at once without your laptop running sluggishly or locking up. Its probably best to have at least 1GB of RAM; 2GB is becoming more of a standard (especially for Vista). Adding RAM may not decrease your boot time, but usually will launch programs faster and allow you to run more programs simultaneously without problems.

2. Disk Defragmenting - Defragging your laptop every so often (depending on how often you use your laptop) is a good idea. Defragging your drive helps increase system performance because it organizes fragmented files that are dispersed across the drive. So instead of the hard drive's head searching around for files, it will know where to find them. This will decrease boot time and help launch programs faster. Defragging your laptop is easy:
Click Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Defragmenter.
Just let your notebook sit for awhile until its done.

3. Lose the Start Up Programs - When you boot your laptop, you probably have a lot of other programs launching automatically. Things that laptop manufacturers, or even you, have loaded onto your notebook. These programs slow down your laptop considerably because having several applications running simultaneously before you even start computing eats up RAM and consumes more of your CPU power. This is an easy fix, just run msconfig from the Start menu. From there you select the programs that you do or do not want launching when you boot you laptop.

For more information for speeding up your laptop, see our Tips for Improving Laptop Performance

Sometimes other issues will still continue to bog down your system, things such as viruses or spyware. A company called Computer Service Now can help with Virus and Spyware Removal

If your laptop is undergoing maintenance or you need a temporary laptop solution, RentOurLaptops offers Online Laptop Rentals.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

My Vista PC is running very fast, i installed 2 GB RAM. For defragmenting i have one of the third party automatic tools which not only defrag in the background but also let me use the system during the process. I think regular maintenance helps keep the performance from deteriorating and prevents early hardware replacements.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the info. Currently posting from my laptop I just brought back from the dead. :)

Grumpy said...

I have 2 home desktop computers, that is where I do the brunt of my work. So I need alot of software, photo's, etc stored on them computers. But my laptop I use mostly for quick access to the internet for email, or to find directions, etc. So what I did was installed a bare bones windows 7 64bit with absolutley no software on it what so ever. Then when I started windows I went to start, run, typed in msconfig then click enter. When the box openes click on services, you will notice a small box you need to check that says hide all microsoft services. Then turn off all the rest of the services. Click save, then restart. Your computer should run much faster. Wen you log back into windows check to see if your antivirus is running. You may have to manually start it from the start menu.

condorx said...

In addition to other steps , Disable The Windows Indexing Service.This is a new tool came up with XP and it allows you to search your local hard drive more quickly. It uses a lot of memory in the background and takes up space on your hard drive

Anonymous said...

Great info. There are a number of reasons that may causing a laptop computer running slow, but generally two categories: hardware part & software part.

For hardware part: upgrade main devices such as Memory, hard drive etc...

For softw-part: there might be a lot of junk files, caches, registry errors... out there which largely slow down any PC machines. about 80% slow computer caused by this reason. For me, I use this speed up PC tool with my HP Pavilion Windows 7 (32bits) machine for quite a few months and it keeps my machine fast, error-free.