A short article describing how you can speed up your computer.

I’m sure you’ve all been through this most miserable situation: you’re busy pounding away at your keyboard, desperately trying to finish that report due the next morning, when your computer slows to a crawl and you find yourself typing two words a minute.

Of course, that scenario could apply to anything from blasting your way to level six on that new PC game, or blasting away at the numbers in your financial records. One question enters your mind when such a horrible thing happens: what is going on and why?

First, the what. Your computer is slowing down to a crawl for one of three major reasons; or a combination of them. Reason one is that you don’t have enough processing power or RAM (Random Access Memory) installed. Reason two is that you have too many programs running at once, and your computer can’t handle the burden. Finally, reason three is that your operating system or your installed software is getting confused or misdirected.

Okay, so you now know what’s wrong and you want to know how to fix it. Well, the obvious thing to do would be to bash your head against your keyboard, but let’s refrain from such desperate measures. The major thing you’ll want to do is close some running programs. If you aren’t using a particular program at the moment, close it. You can always reload your work later. This saves precious processing power and frees RAM.

What else can you do? You could add more RAM. While this may seem costly right now, it will be very beneficial in the near future. Programs continue to become more advanced, and the extra RAM in your system will allow you to run these beefed up programs more efficiently.

Another easy thing to do is perform monthly maintenance on your computer. Clean the dust from your system’s fans and provide plenty of breathing room behind your system. Defragment your hard drive by going into START menu, ALL PROGRAMS, SYSTEM TOOLS, and then click DISK DEFRAGMENTER. Running this helpful utility once a month will keep your system in tip-top shape.

Running better yet? If all else fails, take the system to your local computer repair shop for a free or relatively cheap diagnosis of the problem. If that doesn’t work, you may begin bashing your head against your keyboard. Your computer is headed for that great tech paradise in the sky.