Boosting your laptop

The funny thing about computing equipment and laptops in particular is that their performance appears to decay after a period of time. What was a nice shiny, state of the art ‘go faster’ machine suddenly becomes clunky and slow for no apparent reason. Some users nod sagely and talk about planned obsolescence, and others just go out and buy the new latest faster, memory laden model to get more speed. However,  for most people this is unsustainable financially so they learn to live with a machine that takes forever to boot up , or load a word processing package.

In my world we call this the coffee break boot up. Switch on the laptop and go and have a coffee. With a bit of luck and a following wind, it may have loaded Windows™ and be ready to use when you get back from the coffee machine.

Help however is at hand. There is a number of routines that can be carried out as a laptop performance booster which are inexpensive, do not take up much time, and over the period will much improve the performance of your laptop.

Imagine it as de-cluttering at home. You do this to get extra space and to be rid of things you won’t use again. Taking this approach to technology is inexpensive, good practice  and will be an impressive laptop performance booster. Like everything in life, there are a number of routine housekeeping tasks that can be performed on a regular basis to keep the machine running smoothly.

When you first get a new laptop it will be pre-loaded with programmes that you may never use. Get rid of it straight away. It will probably come pre-loaded with Norton Anti-Virus free trial software. This really eats memory. Get rid of it and use something memory efficient such as AVG. If there are any Anti-Spyware programs installed remove and replace with AVG Anti Spyware. That’s your first major laptop performance booster task carried out.

With Windows™ one of the simplest things to do is to make sure that you don’t save everything to the desktop. This really slows down the boot-up of a laptop. Save them somewhere on the hard drive and put a shortcut on the desktop by all means. Another free and easy laptop performance booster!

Internet browsing is a major performance killer. The amount of temporary internet files left behind, especially if you use the machine mainly for browsing and surfing is quite eye-opening, and whilst these files are all very small in size, twelve thousands of them soon add up. New program packages also tend to leave installation files all over your machine. You will probably never use them again, and if you need to re-install a package you will mostly go straight to the original disk to do so. A couple of really good, free laptop performance booster packages that I use extensively are CC Cleaner and Defraggler by Piriform.

CC Cleaner finds those files that have been left behind by your internet browser, software installers and badly removed packages, decides if it is safe to delete them and gives you the option to do so. It also checks out the Registry and removes any old references that are hanging about and will remove them too, giving you the chance to back the registry up just in case something goes awry. On first use ion a machine, I tend to run the package roughly six times to allow it to find all the unneeded files on a machine. Another benefit of CC Cleaner is that it checks all the little applications that start-up when you boot the machine and lets you disable them. Some of them will be historic remainders from old programs that you may have installed, especially from magazine disks and downloads that seemed a great idea at the time.

Check your Downloads folder. If you download a lot of free applications from the ‘net and install them, the downloaded file remains in your folder. Delete it. You can always get it back again if you need it. I use AVG Anti-Virus software and found fourteen installation packages sitting in my folder, each one representing an upgrade. Now that your free laptop performance booster regime is underway you can run Defraggler. This quite simply checks your hard drive for health and files structure, tells you if it requires maintenance and if so, lets you send it off to move fragments of files into contiguous blocks, speeding up the access of these files.

Run these programs on a regular basis and see the difference it makes to the performance of your machine.

Other simple but effective ways that will definitely be a laptop performance booster are:

• Minimize windows when you are doing something else. This frees up memory

• Close down programmes that you are not using during a session. This can be done from Task Manager and shows you how much memory and CPU power is being used.

• Carefully select an Anti-Virus program. Norton, for example uses a lot of memory to perform its tasks.

• Use an external Hard Drive to hive off files that you will need, but don’t use all the time. You can open, edit and save as required.

• Have virtual memory on your laptop. This is slightly more technical, but there are many guides on how to achieve it on the ‘net and it does make a difference.

• Check the clearance around your laptop. Make sure that the ventilation holes are not blocked as this causes the machine to overheat, slow down, and eventually switch itself off.

• Use a different browser from Internet Explorer, such as Google Chrome. It is lighter, faster and cleans up after itself quite well.

These are just some simple, straightforward laptop performance booster methods that I use. There are many more laptop performance booster software packages such as Spark Trust Inspector, Wondershare 1-Click or PC Pitstop which is an online tool and a lot of good information available on the Web. Check them out before you trade in your machine for a new faster model. It may save you a lot of money,