There are many things you can do to improve the speed of your computer. Generally the speed of your hard drive is one of the most important components of speeding up your computer. You can do a lot to improve the speed of your hard drive.

Keeping your computers hard drive free from clutter is one of the more important things that you can do to help it run faster. If you do this it will not take it as long to pull up your media and files. Organizing using the systems defragment tool is one utility that you can use to keep your system running faster.

Other things you can do to ensure that your system is running at peak performance include fixing any disk errors and registry errors found, increasing the amount of available space on the hard drive, improving the access times of programs and data and protecting your computer from various threats from malware, spyware, adware and viruses.

Adding additional RAM can cost some money but you can save some by using an alternative called ReadyBoost if you are using one of the more recent Windows operating systems.

If your computer is on in years then, over time, the hard drive has probably become cluttered with many now unnecessary programs and other data. There may have been software that came pre-loaded that you never use or when you buy a piece of hardware sometimes software is automatically installed. If you do not use or need these programs then you should use the un-install process to remove them. The more space your hard drive has on it the better off your system will be.

If when you turn your computer on you can go brew a pot a coffee it needs working on. When you start your computer you want to be able to get to work, or play as soon as you can. It is frustrating when you have to wait what seems like forever for your computer to boot up. Well while buying a new system might be the answer in the short run it will not ultimately provide you with a solution unless to take the necessary steps to prevent it from happening again.

There are many utilities that you can use to troubleshoot and resolve your PCs boot issues that are both built into the system and from third parties. Today many programs that you install have the option that is automatic that will cause the program to start up when you turn on your computer. This allows the program to check for updates or just be available to you quicker when you need it. But unless the program is one that you use everyday this feature is a waste.

Disk fragmentation slows the overall performance of your system. When files are fragmented, the computer must search the hard disk as a file is opened (to piece it back together). The response time can be significantly longer.

Disk Defragmenter (sometimes shortened to Defrag by users) is a Windows utility that consolidates fragmented files and folders on your computer’s hard disk so that each occupies a single space on the disk. With your files stored neatly end to end, without fragmentation, reading and writing to the disk speeds up.

In addition to running Disk Defragmenter at regular intervals (weekly is optimal), there are other times you should run it, too, such as when you add a lot of files, the amount of free disk space totals 15 percent or less, you install new programs or a new version of the Windows operating system.