Here are five quick things that you can do easily to make your computer faster. They do not cost you any money. These are frequently the first things that the guy at the computer shop down the street would do if you ask him to make your computer faster. The big difference is that he would charge you $100 to do these things. You can do them for free.

If you have been using your computer for six to 12 months or even longer than the first thing you should do is locate the defragmentation program that came along with your computer. This is a built in program that you should run on a regular basis in order to make it easier for your hard drive to perform well. It will take the pieces of files that have been broken up and stored in a variety of locations or your hard drive and consolidate them into smaller areas. Because your computer does not have to work as hard to find all of these pieces it bus runs quicker.

After you defrag your hard drive, which is as easy as running any other program on your computer, the next thing you want to do is run your disk cleanup utility. This utility also comes along with the Windows operating system and is extremely easy to use. It simply examines your hard drive closely looking for bad sectors that your computer is tripping over and slowing it down. Repairing these bad sectors will make your computer a lot faster.

Surely you have heard of spyware programs and how they can slow your computer down to a crawl. Perhaps you have already suffered through this kind of computer agony. If not, you have been either very lucky or you are running one of the three or commercial anti-spyware programs available to us. You can use Microsoft's free Internet defender program or you can step up your protection another level or two and by one of the online commercial programs which seem to work much more effectively. While these programs may cost you an additional $30 or $40 or even more if you have ever spoken with anyone who has suffered a from spyware programs or their computer they would tell you that if they had the money they would have spent hundreds or $1000 or more to get their computer back. Whatever you do just make sure that you do something to protect yourself against spyware programs.

The next thing you want to do is spend a little bit of time removing some of the thousands of unnecessary files that are stored or in your computer's hard drive. Again there are programs that Microsoft packaged in your computer that will help speed this process for you. In addition you will want to go into your control panel and obtain a list of all of the programs that are running on your computer. You will find some programs that the manufacturer installed on your computer that are absolute garbage. Uninstall them. If you also find programs that you have installed but never used any more install them as well.

This last tip may cost you $50-$100 to implement but it will probably do more then all of the other tips combined in terms of speeding up your computer. Check your instruction book that came along with your computer and see if it is operating with the full complement of random access memory. When you go to your local store to buy some more random access memory just tell them that you need a stick of memory for your computer and they will know what you are talking about. Take your instruction manual with you and they can look up the exact type of memory that you need. When you get home find a screwdriver to remove the case on your computer and in less than 10 minutes that you will find that even the most incompetent of us are shocked by how easy it is to install memory into our computers. If you can plug in a toaster in the morning then you can install additional memory in your computer.

These have been some of the more common things that you can do to make your computer run faster today. Several of these are routine maintenance of things that you should be going or in a regular basis in order to keep your computer running at its fastest. Do them every week or at least once a month and you will find that one a day to day and month to month basis your computer just runs quicker and keep you happier.