Tech Geek

Is your computer not running quite as fast as it did when you first booted it up? Over time, installing and un-installing software can leave behind gunk that slows down your system. This article is going to be focused on Windows PCs, because they're what I know about and because they're probably more likely to have problems than Mac or Linux systems anyways!

There are many different ways to clean up a system and every geek probably has their own favorite tools. These are not necessarily the best tools, but they're the ones that I use and am familiar with. Your mileage may vary, as the saying goes. As you may have picked up from my posts to this point, I am fond of tools that work and that are free to use. But before I get to those, I'm going to make two hardware suggestions.

The first thing to do is to make sure that your system has enough memory. Windows XP needs at leat 512MB to run and really prefers 1 GB, which is equivalent to 1024MB. Windows Vista needs 1 GB and runs much better with 2 GB of RAM. Installing new memory is, literally, a snap. If you don't know how to do it, find one of your students and ask them to do it for you. I was helping an older gentlemen out last week who was thinking he would need to buy a new computer because his was too old. We spend $60 on memory to take his Windows XP system from 256 MB to 1 GB, did some clean-up work, and now he feels like he has a new machine.

Second, if you are using a built-in video card, you might also surprise yourself at how much more responsive your system is if you switch to an add-on card. This helps in two ways. It moves the processing of graphics data from the CPU to the card and it also releases whatever shared memory you were using for graphics back to the system. I'm not a gamer and don't think you need an expensive card, but even a lightweight card can make a difference.

After the hardware is performing well, it's time to take a look at the software. The first program I would suggest running is CCleaner. You can guess what the C stands for. This tool, available for free with donations requested, scans your computer for temporary files that have been left behind. You do want to make sure that you know what you're deleting, especially when messing with the registry, but this tool will most likely speed up your system slightly.

Next, make sure that you don't have spyware that's causing things to run slowly. There are lots of tools out there, some available for free from Yahoo and Google, and some of which you may have already purchased as a part of your anti-virus solution. There are also some online scams that promise to scan your system and then offer to sell your a program. I'm just guessing, but I think they never fail to find something! I have had good luck with Microsoft's Windows Defender. Run a scan when you install the program and then set it up to scan each evening so it will work to keep your system free of spyware.

Finally, defragment your hard drive to help programs load and run more quickly. Windows has a built-in defragmentation program, but I've found that UltraDefrag, an open source program, tends to work better. One of the things I like about it is that you can set it to run on a boot, so it can defragment system files before they are in use.

Don't forget that I love to receive questions so that I'm talking about things you're interested in hearing about!