by Karina Miranda

Created on: May 27, 2010

A slow computer can be really frustrating and even affect productivity in a work setting. Lucky for us, there are several simple steps you can do to help speed up a sluggish system:

1) UNINSTALL UNUSED PROGRAMS AND DISABLE UNNECESSARY STARTUP PROGRAMS

Too many programs installed on the computer take up precious space and can make your system run slow. To reduce the number of programs on your computer, go to Start Menu > Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs (for XP or Vista users) or Programs and Features (for Windows 7 users). This will show a list of all the programs on your computer, with information on their size and perhaps when they were installed or how frequently you use them. Uninstall non-essential programs you don't plan to use in the future, like an old version of a software you've updated or a computer game you tried but didn't enjoy so much. To do this, just select the program and click the "Remove" button (for XP), or right-click the program and select Uninstall  (Vista and Win 7). Be sure that you know what you are uninstalling - you don't want to end up missing important programs. To be on the safe side do a backup or create a system restore point before you uninstall any program.

Startup programs are those that automatically run in the background whenever Windows starts up. A lot of these are really unnecessary and just take up precious memory. The easiest way to disable these is by using a free program called Ccleaner (it's free). Open the program, go to Tools, and select Startup. Pick out the programs you don't need to  always run in the background (like a program updater or a media helper), then click the "Disable" button on the right side. This doesn't delete or uninstall the program, but turns it off at startup.

2) FREE UP WASTED SPACE

Dwindling disk space can also make your computer run slow. You can free this up by deleting old unnecessary files like temporary files, old log files, Recycle bin records and such. Ccleaner is a program that's mainly designed to do that task for you. In the default Cleaner window, just pick out the items you want to clean (default settings work fine), then hit "Run Cleaner". You'll be surprised to discover that you have hundreds of megabytes (or even gigabytes!) of space just lying around in your computer.

3) ADJUST THE VIRTUAL MEMORY

When the computer is running out of system memory (stored in the RAM chip), Windows allocates part of the hard disk, called the paging file or swap file, to store

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