How to Make Your Computer Faster for Free

These methods can be employed on Windows XP, Vista and 7

There are two ways to speed up your computer, this will either include hardware or software improvements, of course upgrading RAM, Processors Hard drives all costs money, but there are lots of software tweaks to speed up your computer for free.

All of the applications listed below don’t cost anything and will make your computer faster for free

1. Run a disk defragment to ensure all files can be loaded in the fastest time possible.
Windows comes with a built in hard disk defragmenter that will make your computer faster for free, to access this go to the Start/Run menu and type dfrg.msc

Once loaded select the C drive and then Analyze, wait a few minutes for the report and then select Defragment, this can take around an hour if never run before. Once finished run every week or two to keep disk fragmentation down to a minimum.

2. Run CHKDSK /R this will check the hard drive for read and write errors and flag and fix any problems.
From the Start/Run menu type CMD and run this.

Now you will see a Black DOS screen, on this type CHKDSK /R you will be advised that it cannot run now and would you like to run the next time you reboot your computer, select YES to this.

3. Make sure that the graphics card hardware acceleration is set to maximum.
Run this from Display settings within control panel, under the troubleshooting section (also enable Write Combining if supported)

4. Run a registry cleanup using an application such as Reg Clean or Auslogics Registry Defrag
The Windows registry can quickly become large and bloated.

Every time you use your computer registry changes are being made, running a registry cleanup will make it nice and trim again.

5. Set Windows to run for performance rather than looks
As a default Windows runs with all of its bells and whistles switched on, this can really hamper performance on slower systems.

To change this go to Control Panel – System – Advanced – Performance/Settings – Adjust for best performance.

If you want Windows to still retain much of its original look select Custom and enable the bottom two options.

6. Lower the screen colors from 32bit to 16bit the visual difference is really unnoticeable.
A very simple yet effective way to eek out a little more performance, go to Control Panel – Display and change the colors from 32bit to 16.

7. Disable any hardware resources that you don’t need, this can include things such as modems, card bus slots.
Every piece of hardware running in your computer requires a driver, this in turn uses memory, so if possible disable any unused hardware, this is a pretty comprehensive subject so checkout our article below for more information on this.

8. Virus and malware, malware or virus’s can cause your computer to run slooooow.
Of course Viruses and other types of malware can cause your computer to run slow, everyone knows that, but did you also know certain large and bloated antivirus products can also slow down your computer?

9. File cleanup, Windows provides us with a built in program to do this.
If you go to My Computer or Computer and right click on the C drive and choose properties – you will see a disk cleanup option, run this and see how much space this can reclaim for you.

10. If your computer has a shared memory type graphics card if possible allocate the bare minimum to graphics so the rest of your computers applications can use more RAM.
This type of video card generally has its memory allocation within the BIOS, access this and you will be able to allocate more memory to where it’s really needed.

11. Setup a custom fixed page file.
by setting up a fixed or custom page file we allocate memory directly to Windows as opposed to it dynamically allocating it itself, this means more memory always available, plus we have the option to create a secondary fixed page file on another drive or partition to enhance page file performance still further.

As you can see it is possible to make your computer faster for free

Please see below for more information on each of the topics above.

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