10 ways to speed up your laptop

Source: Vsoftsystems, 10/09/2018

Does your ageing laptop need a boost? We look at the software tweaks
and hardware upgrades that will give your computer a new lease of life
Whether you`ve just bought a new computer or you`ve been using your
existing one for a while, you may notice over time that it starts
slowing down and tasks that used to take seconds now take a lot
longer. This is natural behaviour for any computer, whether it`s a
Windows 10 machine, Windows 8, MacBook or Linux laptop.
This is because as you install more apps and run them concurrently,
your laptop has to split the memory used to make things happen more
thinly and so it will affect the performance of your device. The
number of files you`re downloading, syncing with third party storage
applications and using will also affect a computer`s performance.
Of course, a slow-running laptop can be extremely frustrating:
watching that progress bar or spinning wheel chug round in circles can
make even the most patient person lose their rag.
Although it`s unlikely your computer will ever operate as it did when
you first lifted it out of its box (unless you remove everything from
it), there are some things you can do to get some of its speed back.
Fortunately it doesn`t involve a reset or restore, just little tweaks
that together can make a big difference.
Here are our top 10 tips for speeding up your laptop and offering a
little relief when carrying out everyday tasks.
1 â€` How to speed up a laptop: Delete unused programs
Over time, it`s easy to build up a number of programs on your laptop
that you don`t really use any more. It`s therefore a good idea to
uninstall all the programs you don`t plan to use as it will help speed
up the system. Microsoft says it`s especially important to delete any
utility programs you might have installed over the months of use, such
as virus scanners, disk cleaners, and backup tools, as they often run
automatically at startup, quietly chugging along in the background
where you can`t see them. `Many people have no idea they`re even
running,` Microsoft warns.
It`s never too late to remove these and get rid of the clutter and
wasted system resources. Maybe you thought you might use the software
someday, but never did. Uninstall it and your PC should run faster.
2. How to speed up a laptop: Limit startup programs
Many programs are designed to start automatically when Windows starts.
Software manufacturers often set their programs to open in the
background, where you can`t see them running, so they`ll open right
away when you click their icons. That`s helpful for programs you use a
lot, but for programs you rarely or never use, this wastes precious
memory and slows down the time it takes Windows to finish starting up.
However, you can decide for yourself if you want a program to run at
startup.
To see how can you tell what programs run automatically at startup,
use AutoRuns for Windows. It`s a free tool that you can download from
the Microsoft website, and shows you all of the programs and processes
that run when you start your OS. You can stop a program from running
automatically when Windows starts by opening the AutoRuns for Windows
program, and then by clearing the checkbox next to the name of the
program you want to stop. AutoRuns for Windows is designed for
advanced users.
3 â€` How to speed up a laptop: Get rid of `bloatware`
It`s not just old computers that can suffer from latency. New
computers can too and that`s down to the bloatware manufacturers
preinstall on their laptops. Whether you refer to it as bloatware or
crapware, this unwanted software can really slow down a computer.
It`s pretty likely you probably don`t even need all these extras that
ship with your computer. If you`ve let them reside on your machine
since you bought it, you`ll probably want to have an audit of what you
use and really need and what you don`t. Think of it as a spring clean
for your machinery.
Programs such as PCDecrapifier can make the process of getting rid of
bloatware really painless and is a quick win for those looking to
speed up their notebooks.
4 â€` How to speed up a laptop: CCleaner
One of the first things you should do if your computer is not
runningas fast as it used to is to run a file scanner to check whether
there are any old files or folders you don`t need anymore or haven`t
used for a long time. Any of this extra data, such as caches,
temporary files (that aren`t temporary at all) and cookies can make
your computer run much slower.
One of the trusty tools that will clean up your computer for you is
CCleaner. It`ll crawl your computer`s hard drive, searching for any
files that haven`t been used for a long time, deleting them if you
give it permission to. It will also look for any problems with the
registry that may be slowing down your computer and a tools tab allows
you to uninstall programs right from the app, switch off startup
programs and identify large files on your machine that are taking up
disk space.
First, download and install CCleaner. Once installed, start the
application. This will open on the cleaner tab. Click on Run Cleaner
and this will scan the drive looking for items such as temporary
internet files, memory dumps and more advanced stuff like cleaning out
Prefetch data. You can choose what items you want to scan for, such as
specific applications or system components.

Second, click on the Registry tab to clean this of unnecessary entries
that could slow down your laptop.
Third, use the Tools tab to uninstall various programs and apps
already installed on your system. Sometimes, PC manufacturers
pre-install unwanted apps and removing these can really speed up your
computer in no time.
5 â€` How to speed up a laptop: Get defragging
Old mechanical hard drives suffer a lot from defragmentation (this
doesn’t happen on solid state disk so you can skip this step).
This means that files are often scattered across a drive and this
slows the machine down as it tries to access all portions of the file.
Defragging will put the files back together again and hopefully
increase speeds of hard drive access at the same time.
To defrag your hard drive, go into the control panel, select `System
and Security` under Administrative Tools.
You can analyse the drive to see how fragmented it is. Next, click on
the drive you want to defrag. This will then run the process, speeding
up the drive.
6 â€` How to speed up a laptop: ReadyBoost
ReadyBoost is a feature of Windows that was introduced in Windows
Vista. It essentially uses a flash drive as a bit of extra memory.
Perhaps not as good as swapping a traditional hard drive for a solid
state one or adding more RAM, ReadyBoost will give a little uptick to
the performance of your system. It puts aside a part of the flash
drive memory for things such as caching, assisting often-used apps to
open quicker, and increasing random read access speeds of the hard disk.
To use ReadyBoost, first insert a USB memory drive into an empty slot
on the laptop you wish to speed up. A dialogue box will open asking
you what you want to do with the flash drive. Choose ‘Speed up my
system using Windows ReadyBoost`. Another window will open and here
you can select how much of the drive you wish to use on the flash pen.
It is generally a good idea to use as much of the drive as possible.
Once that is done, confirm the settings and the window will close. The
drive will be automatically detected and used whenever it is plugged it.
One last note, if your machine is fast enough, Windows will prevent
you using ReadyBoost.
7 â€` How to speed up a laptop: Switch off unnecessary animations

Ever since Windows Vista (and some would argue Windows XP), the
operating system has had fancy graphics and animated flourishes that
did little to improve productivity. If these are slowing things down,
it is easy to switch off everything and run on the bare essentials.
To do this, open that Start Menu and start typing in `Adjust the
appearance and performance of Windows`. Click on this option and from
the scroll menu untick everything you don’t wish to see on the desktop
(such as shadows, smooth fonts, etc.) Click on OK and this will change
the desktop to something more basic looking.
On systems other than Windows 10, switching everything off gives the
desktop a Windows 95-style look and feel. It is surprising to note how
much of the so-called `flat look` of Windows 10 relies on graphical
flourishes when you switch everything off.
8 â€` Make Windows 10 search quicker and more useful
Search indexing in Windows 10 has come a long way from its origins in
previous Windows versions. The advice until recently was to disable
this completely, but it has become too integral to the Windows
experience to do that.
However, you can improve the speed of finding things on your laptop by
using a few tweaks. First, you can disable the web results in search
(let’s face it you use the browser for this and most likely Google
rather than Bing). Simply, hit the Windows key, type gpedit.msc and
hit enter. With the Group Policy Editor open, click on Local Computer
Policy > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows
Components > Search.
Find `Do not allow web search` and double-click this. Switch the
preference to enabled. Then find `Don`t search the web or display web
results in Search` and double-click this. Switch the preference to
enabled. Lastly, `Don`t search the web or display web results in
Search over metered connections` and double-click this. Switch the
preference to enabled.
You can also change the locations that Windows Search indexes to
exclude stuff you know you don’t need to find, such as the App Data
folder that contains, among other things web browser cache and
cookies. If you don’t use Internet Explorer or Edge you may not want
these indexed either.
To manage these, open the Indexing Options by pressing Windows and
Pause to open the System control panel, then click on `All control
panel items` in the location bar at the top, and the find and click on
Indexing Options. This then opens a window that shows locations that
are included by Windows 10`s search indexer. Here you can choose which
locations to include or exclude to speed up this search function.
9 â€` How to speed up a laptop: add more RAM
If your laptop has around 2GB of memory, upgrading is a great way of
eking out extra performance. There are some caveats to this, however.
If you are running a 32-bit version of Windows, the maximum amount of
RAM you can have in one system is 3GB. With these systems, if you have
2GB and you add another 2GB, Windows will only use 3GB of RAM. This is
because of the limits 32-bit operating systems have when addressing
memory.
10 â€` How to speed up a laptop: Swap out for an SSD
If your laptop has a mechanical hard drive, then swapping it for a
solid state drive (SSD) could pay dividends. As there are no moving
parts, an SSD has read and write speeds far quicker than any
traditional drive.
Over the past few years, SSD prices have gone down and capacities up.
So putting one in your laptop won’t break the bank.
Rather than reinstalling Windows, you can use a cloning tool to copy
everything from your old disk to an SSD. Freeware, such as Todo Backup
Free 9.0, will do the trick.