What are three things you can do to make your computer run faster?

Answer 1

This is a very broad question and covers several levels.

Hardware
If the computer is very old, you could get a newer one. However, if it is quite old, you might find good deals on components on an auction site or be able to win a decent bid. Sometimes $10 for a faster CPU and $10 for more and faster memory helps significantly. You might be able to upgrade the graphics adapter to something somewhat faster for dirt cheap. Sometimes people sell their old ones because they went with faster. As you shop, you should use a good benchmark site.

Software
You can often get a lot of performance though software changes and system maintenance, and most of the software and maintenance is free. Here is how to speed things up from the software end.

1. Visit the Add and Remove Programs or Programs and Features area of the control panel. You may have to change the control panel display options in Vista and Higher to get to see the advanced control panel view. Check the list to see what you don't use, don't recognize, or never recall installing. If it is related to Microsoft, Java, Flash, or has the name of your computer or components manufacturer (nVida, MSI, AMD, ATI, Intel, Asus, Dell, etc.) or seems like a driver, leave it.

2. Go to the Advanced tab of System Properties and you can set the display options to maximum performance. But I would not disable all of that. You might want font smoothing, and you might like the visual styles on the windows and buttons. But do disable a lot of the options here.

3. While in the control panel, you might as well check your hard drive and drive controller options. Go to System and to the Hardware Manager. (As a shortcut to System, you can do the Windows+Pause key combination from anywhere.) In the IDE controller section, you should check to see that the DMA options are enabled if there are any there. For the hard drives, enable all the caches and performance modes, and if it is an internal drive or a stick you keep plugged in, set it to performance instead of ease of removal.

4. Open all the browsers installed, if you use them or not, and find where you manage add-ons (plugins, extensions). See if there are any toolbars you don't use or didn't install. Remove those. That often fixes browser crashes too. If you cannot remove some plugins or the browsers don't work, you can skip that for now. You will make other changes that will fix that.

5. Try installing various malware programs. Most have free versions, but make sure you don't accept any other software like toolbars. Here are some anti-malware programs:

Ad-Aware
AdwCleaner
HitmanPro 32-bit or 64-bit
Malware Bytes
Spybot Search and Destroy

Make sure if you are running it on a machine with UAC enabled that you right click on the programs and run as administrator. If things won't remove, you might have to try a number of options. One is to open the Task Manager (Ctrl-Shift-Esc) and kill any processes you are trying to remove. In Spybot S&D, you should right click and try to jump to the location of what won't remove. If you can find the file in question on the hard drive, you can try to delete it, but if it won't, rename it (one loophole for getting around unwanted locked files). Then you can delete it after rebooting. If the unwanted item is a registry key, and it won't remove, you will need to navigate there (jump to in Spybot) and change the permissions on the unwanted key.

6. If you desire, remove unwanted files. Go to the search bar or the Run command in the Start Menu and type in Cleanmgr.exe. If you are using XP or 2003 Server, you might have to type in the full path to the file and it may be in the \Windows\System folder. On the first page, you can remove logs, empty the trash, remove backups made during an update, etc. You could compress files if given that option, but that could slow things down. On the other page, you can delete all your restore points but the last and any old backups or shadow copies.

If you want to clean more stuff, you will likely want software for this such as Ccleaner unless you want to dig for them.

7. You might want to use Autorunsif you are tech savvy and want to remove invalid or unwanted entries. But only delete those that say "file not found" or which you know you don't want. Or you can just untag things. But be careful and don't make changes with this tool unless you know that you are doing. You will need to start this is administrator mode if you are running Vista or higher and have UAC enabled. If you uncheck an item, that temporarily disables it. Highlighting something and then pressing delete permanently deletes the entry. You will likely only be interested in the first 4 tabs. Other tabs like Services should be left alone unless you know some malware or program you don't want has installed a system service. If you removed malware, you may have a bunch of "file not found" entries in places.

You should generally leave the Boot Execute tab alone other than to check to see there are only 1-2 entries, with one that should read "autocheck autochk *" that's listed as being under the "BootExecute" registry key. In rare situations where this key is damaged, you would right-click and go to "Jump to Entry." That will load the registry editor. Then you can double-click BootExecute inside Regedit and make sure the data field reads "autocheck autochk *" (no quotes) if it doesn't already.

8. If you want to compact the registry, which means to rebuild it to make it smaller, not "clean" it, you can use NTREGOPT. On Vista and higher, you will need to right-click on it and run as Administrator unless you've disabled UAC.

9. You can defragment the computer. Using Windows, you can go to My Computer or Computer and right click on the drive you want to defragment and go to Properties, and then the Tools tab. Or, you can use a 3rd party program like Defragler.

10. There are a number of small or miscellaneous things to try. Sometimes you can make CMOS changes to improve performance. You'd want to make sure you drives all use DMA or UDMA if available, SATA 3 if available, block mode if available. You can disable unused ports and devices, and disable any delays or splash screens. If you are using an on-board video card, you could reserve more system memory for it to improve performance, unless you are low on RAM. If there are any AGP apertures, you can increase those for video performance at the cost of system memory at times. You can increase the latency for PCIe devices to allow them to seize the lines for longer and do more work, and if there is a Generation 3 option, enable it if you are using Generation 3 cards. If your RAM timings or speed are detected wrong, you can sometimes override them in CMOS.

Windows XP and earlier have an advanced system setting in the System area of the control panel that you can disable (Allow Synchronous Commits or whatever) to speed things up, and you should make sure the DMA options for the drives or the drive controller ports are set in the Control Panel.

Flashing the system BIOS can sometimes speed things up, make things more stable, reduce crashes, and allow compatibility with more components. Sometimes new CPUs are released after the BIOS was made, so there may be updates to allow use of the newer components. In one case, certain ATI video cards made the system hang on boot or wait for a long time before booting, and new BIOS code fixed that. Also, most CPUs now use microcode to allow for instruction patching in case the CPU has bugs. That is better for manufacturers than a recall. So newer BIOS versions can patch around a buggy CPU you may have and prevent computational errors or certain crashes.

11. You should reinstall anything that isn't working. If malware trashed your browser(s), you may need to reinstall them.

Answer 2

Upgrade yout hardware, if yout hardware is outdated some programs might not run very fluently.

Clean up your hdd, sometimes when your hdd is almost full, your computer will run slower.

Check for viruses, often when a computer is slow for an unkown reason a virus is the cause for it.

Hope this helped you out a bit

Answer 3

http://www.wikihow.com/Speed-up-a-Windows-XP-Computer