As we grow old, and as I realise that inevitably, I shall pile on the years and age shall catch up to me, I realise I am not as fast as I was when I was a teenager, nor am I flexible, nor did I remember having those aches and pains as before. I like to apply this logic to anyone who has ever owned a desktop or laptop computer – it was fast, furious and a cutting edge machine the day you bought it; but now as dog years is to computer years, few short months down the road, it has become old, irritable and constantly complaining of such gobbledegook as runtime errors and blue screen messages that prelude a suddenly all familiar crash. How can I make my computer run faster, I asked myself often and looking at myself, I feel the answers are obvious.



Clutter. I liken it to fat deposits that seem to appear magically after a good week's meal. After a few months of installing and uninstalling programs, some of them junk and fast fixes to a digital diet, a quick craving for something that catches our eye on a download link - we leave traces of their existence, even when we try our best to uninstall them. Free floating files, temp files and unused DLL's are just some of the clutter that they can leave behind. They choke the arteries and tubes of your Windows OS and cause it to wheeze and blither at every turn. Time to give it a crash diet. Remove programs you are not using, delete those that are eating a lot of memory and customise your start ups so that a minimum amount of programs are loaded at any one time.

Viruses and malware. When we get sick, we aren't exactly at the top of our game. Computers get sick as well, and there are a host of pandemics that are floating around cyberspace just waiting for their moment to get their claws on your computer. They eat away at your memory, install bogus programs, launch background applications, send emails, steal your passwords – all at the cost of some serious performance. Once they get into the ram sectors of your drive and start fiddling around with crucial DLL's and virtual memory banks – you will either get a slow or dead computer. Go to the doctor and get an antivirus program that reveals to you these viruses and worms you didn't know you had in your computer. Clearing them out will do you a world of good and speed things up pronto.

Your registry. It is the brain of your computer. And I wouldn't be the first to say the brain is the most important part of our body. The registry can be rife with missing shared DLL's, unused file extensions, active X issues, obsolete software, bad registry values – all caused by bad program installs or members of the malware and virus families leaving their footprints all over the nerve cells of your registry. Get a good registry optimiser and cleaner, they have the delicate hands antivirus programs do not to fix a rampant problem in all slow PC's.

These are the ways you can make your computer run faster, and there are many more issues you and know one else knows about. It's a start, a good one, to gaining back some speed in your machine.