You are working from home and your laptop just doesn't want to cooperate! You’re not alone in the quest to unclog your machine and we are here to help with some quick and useful tips to speed up your computer today!
1. Delete Unwanted Files, Images & Videos
There are several places that unwanted files can be dwelling in your machine, using up precious space and slowing it down significantly. You may have created several folders with images, music, videos etc. in different locations on your hard drive, so head into those and be ruthless. A lot of these pictures, videos and music can be uploaded to the cloud in order to clear space.
2. Defragment Your Hard Drive
With long use information on your hard drive can become scattered, meaning the computer has to work harder to find it. Defragmenting it can neatly reorganise your information, which can significantly improve your computer’s speed.
Start typing in “Defrag” to the search bar to get to the program. By using the buttons in the window, you can analyse your disk to see how fragmented it is currently, or just run the process straight away. If you have more than one HDD, do this for all.
3. Change Your Internet Browser
If surfing the web is grinding the performance of your computer down to a halt, it might be worth experimenting with a more lightweight browser. Google Chrome tends to use a lot of your resources and can slow down even a powerful machine. Try a browser like Firefox or Microsoft Edge.
4. Delete Temporary Files
Temporary files are files that are created to hold data temporarily. These files can use a lot of your disk space and may slow down your windows computer. You should delete them from time to time to free up space and increase performance.
To delete the Temp files, you just need to open the Start Menu and type %temp% in the search box. You will see all the temporary files in the Temp folder and you can select them all and delete. The ones which are currently active won't be deleted.
5. Uninstall Unused Applications
You will be surprised how many programs are on your computer that you don’t use and do not need. To get a full look go to the “Control Panel”, then to “Apps & Features”. From here you can see by the usage which applications you never use. You can left-click on them and select “Uninstall” to remove them. Do not remove anything branded with Windows as this is most likely essential to your machine running.
6. Turn Off Animations
Animations are what makes Windows look pretty, but they also eat up a lot of the processing power. Here’s what you need to do to turn them off:
STEP 1
Open the Start Menu and type in ‘Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows’.
STEP 2
You can control which visual effects you wish to turn off from the scroll menu, or you can select ‘Adjust for best performance’ to disable them all. Click OK and you are done!