Five fixes to help your computer run raster

You expect your computer to be fast and responsive. You certainly don’t want to be sitting around waiting while it loads your applications or saves your documents. You need your IT to be so fast it's invisible, unnoticeable, because that’s when its causing you no problems.

Here are five things you can do right now, that could help your computer run faster.

1. If you haven’t for a while, restart your machine.

When you restart your computer, it wipes clean any code that is acting up. It cleans away any problems that have developed and takes it back to its original state. A restart stops programs running that might be causing an issue. This put’s your computer in a quick time out, so it can think about all the naughty things it’s doing, giving you a chance to start again. It is much quicker than looking through the computer’s entire inner workings, to pin point the exact reasons its going slower. Because chances are, when the slate is wiped clean, the issue will be wiped making the computer run faster.

2. Give the machine a good malware scan.

Malware can slow down your computer as they mess around with everything from commandeering your browser to pushing advertising & even crashing your computer. Once your Anti-Virus has detected any malware and gotten rid of it, your computer should speed up again

3. Let any updates run.

If Windows is out of date it can cause the computer to run slowly. Updates will fix bugs and boost performance so it’s always a good idea to check you are using the latest version. Your updates might be automatic, you should still manually check for updates in the Control Panel as only the essential updates are installed automatically.

4. Add RAM

Increasing your RAM doesn’t necessarily make your computer run faster. What it does do, however, is allow you to do more things at once. When all the RAM on your machine is used, the PC then uses “Virtual Memory”. This is when the computer swaps applications from RAM to the hard drive temporarily, then back again when they are in use. This juggling act means your PC performs at a slower speed. Having more RAM prevents the need to swap creating a faster working pace.

5. Upgrade to SSD

SSD upgrades bring big performance gains as it has no moving parts. Your usual hard drive has a disk that spins and you need to wait until the data you need is under the reader. With Solid state drive that is not the case. You have no waiting to do, which means your whole machine will run quicker and smoother.