If your portable computer is getting slow, you probably don’t need a professional technician to solve that issue. A laptop becomes “naturally” slow due to usage. Doing regular maintenance to your machine will free up resources and contribute to a smooth utilization. Check out the main steps you should perform if you feel your laptop is behaving too slowly.
Hard drive: capacity
The hard drives of your computer should never be above 75% of their capacity, as that will become a hindrance to the overall functioning. Some professionals recommend the disk to be kept below 50% of its capacity. Spread some of your files into external hard drives or to the cloud. You should do back-ups of those, anyway, so why keep too many files in the hard drive of your laptop?
Hard drive: clean up
By the way, how many of those files do you need at all? Some of them might be temporary files created by Windows. You should regularly perform a disk cleanup. Right-click on your hard drive icon and eliminate unnecessary or unwanted files.
Remove programs
It’s amazing how many software and programs we end up with, after some time of utilization. You
‘re probably not using many of them frequently, though; some of them might have been used only once. Remove them to “alleviate” your laptop.
Start
How many programs do you have running on your computer right now? Probably more than you expect – and need. It’s a common feature for several programs – some of them well-known, like Skype – to start automatically, together with Windows.
There are several ways to stop these programs from starting automatically. One of them is to launch the System Configuration screen (by typing msconfig after pressing Start), check the Startup tab and then uncheck the programs that you don’t want to be always running in the back.
RAM
As you can reduce the demand of your computer, you can also increase its capacity, to be able to cope with the demand. Adding more RAM is the most immediate measure if you want to speed up the computer (more than more processing or hard drive capacity). You may want to buy a RAM card and install it yourself or ask a professional to perform an upgrade.