Speed Up Your Old PC+Laptop+Notebook

Is your once super and mighty computer running slow nowadays? Although it can’t be denied that new computers generally do perform better than older computers, it doesn’t mean that you should just throw it away because it’s now running slower then it used to.

Now here’s something that most computer stores/retailers/repairs don’t tell you, either because they don’t want to or they don’t know about this, but here’s what you can do to tweak your pc, laptop or notebook to make it as new again.

Clean The Fan

First and foremost, open up your cpu and clean the fan. The fan is the single most important component in your computer as it’s essential to cool down your processor, motherboard, hard disk, audio/graphics cards and all other hardware components.

If you let dust accumulate around it, the fan will find it harder to rotate and this directly causes your computer to heat up till a certain degree where your system will try to do only the minimum by slowing itself down. Have you seen your CPU usage in task manager shoot up to 100%, the fan is spinning like crazy, cpu heats up and whole system responding sluggishly? The fan, or in fact, the dust around the fan cooling system, is probably the main culprit.

Reformat Your System

If you can, just reformat your operating system (windows/linux/mac) partition once a year and start afresh. Always store data in a separate partition so you don’t lose them when you’re formatting the main partition (where the operating system will be installed on).

Add More RAM

If after cleaning the fan and reformating a new system your applications are still responding sluggishly, you might want to add more RAM into your computer. Newer applications tend to contain more bells and whistles which needs more RAM to operate. Tips: if you’re on an older computer, try not to multitask (ex. open up 5 applications or lots of browser tabs at the same time) as that will definitely consume more RAM and make the pool of available RAM for each application smaller. Check out this list for the best selling computer RAM.

Get A New Hard Disk

The hard disk might already be too old and there’s little space left to keep up with growing application size and media (pictures, music, movies etc) that’s sitting in your computer. If so, please refer to this list of best selling SATA hard disks, do yourself a favor and buy a new hard disk.

See, there are really just 2 things you should check when your computer is running slow – it’s either a hardware or a software problem.

In this case, the most direct approach that I can see to save your slow machine system back up to speed again is:
Hardware Fix – Clean your fan (or add more RAM if necessarily)
Software Fix – Reformat your system

I hope you find this useful.