Many common PC speed tips actually make things worse. Wayne Williams exposes 21 mistakes that you may not realise are slowing down your system
We’re sure that regular readers of this magazine understand the importance of regular PC maintenance and are familiar with the basics, such as defragging your hard drive, deleting junk files, uninstalling old programs and so on. Following these good practices won’t necessarily guarantee you’re getting the maximum possible speed from your computer, however – there are plenty of mistakes we all make that can adversely affect how quickly and smoothly our PCs run.
In this feature, we highlight 21 common blunders and oversights, and explain how you can avoid them to give your computer a significant speed boost. Over the following eight pages, we explain how cleaning your system too regularly – or too thoroughly – can actually slow it down, and highlight common hardware-related errors you might be making that stop you getting the maximum speed out of your system. We also explain what you should be doing to make your PC faster.
CLEANUP CONFUSION
1 Cleaning the Windows Registry
The theory behind Registry cleaners and defragmenters is sound enough. A Registry cleaner scans the Windows Registry, identifies errors and outdated keys that could be causing performance problems, and offers to remove them. A Registry defragmenter, on the other hand, reorders the database so all the important data is kept together and there no gaping holes. Such tools might have been beneficial in the days of Windows XP, but modern computers are so fast that even if there are hundreds of incorrect and outdated entries in the Registry, they’re unlikely to slow down your PC or cause problems. Despite what the developers of such programs (which can cost upwards of £20) tell you, any speed boost you get from defragging the Registry will be negligible.
It’s true that it may be worth cleaning the Registry very occasionally as part of a full maintenance routine, especially on a PC that hasn’t received any care or attention for some time, but you definitely shouldn’t do it too often. Deleting a single important entry by mistake will do more harm than good and may actually bring Windows to a halt.
2 Running CCleaner too thoroughly
CCleaner (www.piriform.com/ccleaner) is a brilliant free maintenance tool for your computer. As well as cleaning up the junk files that are left behind by programs and everyday use, it includes a startup manager, browser plugins remover, disk analyser, duplicate finder and drive wiper. CCleaner does an excellent job of keeping your system tidy, but the program makes it all too easy to go overboard with cleaning, which can cause performance problems.
For example, CCleaner cleans your browser’s cache by default, which actually slows down your web browsing. That’s because, when you visit a site, your browser caches the web content it downloads. The next time you return to that site, the browser retrieves elements that haven’t changed from the cache rather than downloading them again, which saves time. Any old files are removed from the cache automatically so it really doesn’t need cleaning.
CCleaner is definitely worth using, but you shouldn’t use it more than once a month, and perhaps avoid cleaning the browser cache unless you really have to.
3 Emptying the Prefetch folder
Windows keeps an eye on how your PC boots and which programs you run, and stores this information in a number of small files (with a ‘.pf’ extension) in the Prefetch folder. This folder works like a cache. When you run a program, Windows refers to these files to help speed up the loading process. A common PC myth (Google it to see what we mean) says that cleaning out the Prefetch folder can be beneficial because it stops Windows wasting time reading the files and removing old, superfluous items as it boots up.
In fact, cleaning this folder actually increases program loading times and may even cause other problems. The Prefetch folder is self-maintaining and stores a maximum of 128 of your most recently used programs. If you remove entries from the Prefetch folder, Windows will simply recreate them the next time you load the related program, so your best bet is to leave well alone.
4 Ignoring Windows 10 installation files
Whether you’ve upgraded to Windows 10 or are still running Windows 7 or 8.1, there’s a good chance you’ll have Windows 10 installation files sitting on your hard drive, taking up huge amounts of space unnecessarily. If your hard drive is becoming dangerously full, you should definitely consider removing these files to reclaim space and boost performance.
The process is very straightforward. Click Start, type Disk Cleanup and launch the Disk Cleanup app. Make sure your system drive is selected and click OK. Next, click the ‘Clean up system files’ button, select your system drive again and click OK. The tool calculates how much space you can save and highlights any Previous Windows installation(s). These may include a 20GB-plus entry created by Windows 10. Tick this box and the one next to ‘Temporary Windows installation files’ (which will save you another large chunk of space), then click OK to remove those files and reclaim your missing drive space.
Before you delete the files, however, be aware that if you recently upgraded to Windows 10, these are the files you need to roll back your system to a previous installation of Windows. Removing them takes away that option.
If you’re not planning to upgrade to Windows 10, clearing away these files makes a lot of sense, but there’s a good chance they’ll reappear because Microsoft really wants you to upgrade. To stop this happening, use Never 10 (bit.ly/never396) to disable these ‘recommended’ updates.
5 Disabling or delaying Windows services
Windows launches a lot of services when it starts up, and you have to wait for them all to load before you can use the operating system properly. You can disable or delay some of these items by using the Services tool. If you click Start, then type services.msc and hit Enter, you can browse the list of services. Double-click one and, in the Startup type box, you can choose Automatic, Manual, Automatic (Delayed Start) or Disabled.
Tempting as this may seem, disabling or delaying some of these services won’t necessarily result in faster Windows startup. Today’s computers have enough memory to handle all the services Windows wants to launch without slowing down. It usually loads more than one at a time and, once it has loaded them all, your PC is ready to use. If you delay services, Windows simply loads them two minutes later, so if you think about it, all you’re really doing is prolonging how long Windows takes to start up fully.
HARDWARE HOWLERS
6 Not rebooting your PC regularly
It’s easy to leave your computer running for days, weeks or even months without rebooting. As with iPads and mobile phones, we’ve got used to having our devices switched on and ready to use at all times. If your PC takes a while to boot up, you may decide to use a low-power standby mode rather than shutting down so you can get back into Windows faster. Although that’s perfectly understandable, regularly shutting down your computer will give your system a noticeable performance boost. Your PC accrues all sorts of junk while it’s running and can suffer from problems such as memory leaks. Over time, these can make your PC sluggish. Shutting down your system fixes any problems you might be having and gives your PC a fresh start.
As to how often you should reboot, that depends on your system. Older, slower computers with limited memory need to be rebooted more often than newer PCs that have lots of memory. Rebooting at least a couple of times a week is a good target.
7 Leaving your PC plugged in constantly
As well as shutting down your PC, it’s also worth draining any power from it, because this will reset the hardware properly and make it work faster. Once your computer has shut down, remove the power cable, or take out the battery if you’re using a laptop. Press the ‘on’ button several times to drain any remaining power, then plug the cable back in or reinsert the battery, and power it up again.
8 Using a hard drive instead of an SSD
Many people think that when their hard drive gets too full, it will lead to slowdowns. That’s true in part because Windows likes to have some room to work, but provided your computer has a reasonable amount of memory installed, Windows won’t need to use a portion of the hard drive as virtual memory (see tip 10). If you need more storage space for your files, such as video clips, music and photos, then by all means buy a larger hard drive, but for a speed boost you’re better off replacing your standard hard disk drive (HDD) with a solid-state drive (SSD).
Switching to an SSD is easily the best hardware upgrade you can perform, and will make a huge difference to how quickly your PC boots up and programs load. The ideal situation is to have a decent SSD for your system drive, and an HDD for items you don’t need to access continually, such as your personal files. If you have an old laptop that’s really sluggish, replacing its hard drive with an SSD will give it a new lease of life. Per gigabyte, SSDs are much more expensive that HDDs, but we think the benefits easily outweigh the cost.
9 Using the wrong-speed hard drive
Mechanical hard drives tend to come in two speeds: 5,400RPM (revolutions per minute) and 7,200RPM. If you have a slower drive, you might be tempted to swap it for a faster replacement. In theory, a 7,200RPM disk is 33% faster than a 5,400RPM disk, but that doesn’t take into account other factors such as ‘areal density’ – the number of bits a drive can store on a length of track. A drive with a greater density of data on its platters can access more information per spin. So an older 7,200RPM drive may actually access data slower than a newer 5,400RPM drive. Not only that, but the newer drive will generate much less heat, use less power and suffer less wear and tear on the head. It’s also likely to be cheaper.
10 Installing the wrong type of memory
Installing an SSD is the best way to speed up a slow computer, but adding extra memory is the next thing to try. When Windows needs more memory than is available, it uses virtual memory – reading and writing data to an area of the hard drive known as the page file. This is a much slower process than accessing real RAM (especially if you have a mechanical HDD installed rather than an SSD), so adding more memory modules will obviously speed things up. However, the amount of RAM you can add is limited by your motherboard and the operating system you’re running. If you have the 32-bit version of Windows 7 installed, for example, you can only make use of around 3.5GB. The 64-bit version of Windows 10 Pro can handle up to 2TB, which is quite a difference. The type of RAM you should install depends on your motherboard. Older systems may use DDR2 or DDR3 modules, while the newest will use DDR4. These come in different rates, too, and although you can combine modules of different speeds, they will run at the speed of the slowest module.
While it can be tempting to cram your PC with extra memory modules, it may not lead to huge speed boosts – it all depends on how you use your system. To check your memory usage in Windows 10, press Ctrl+ Shift+Esc to open the Task Manager, click the Performance tab, then click Memory and use your computer as you would normally for a while. This will show you how much RAM you usually use and give you an idea of how much extra RAM – if any – you require.
11 Defragging your SSD
Unlike mechanical hard-disk drives, solid-state drives don’t require defragging – ever! In fact, frequent defragging of an SSD can shorten its lifespan significantly. Newer operating systems, including Windows 10, recognise when a drive is an SSD and won’t allow it to be defragged. The same is true of newer disk-defragmentation software, but that may not be the case with older operating systems and defrag tools.
However, defragmentation programs can optimise SSDs using the TRIM command. This tells the SSD which blocks of data are no longer considered in use and can be wiped. To see this in action in Windows, click Start, type defrag and run the Defrag function. Your system drive should be listed as a Solid State Drive under Media Type. Select it and click the Optimise button.
That’s not to say treating your SSD in this way will actually make any difference to its performance. In fact, you probably won’t notice any speed improvements.
12 Letting PC components overheat
Heat is the enemy of sensitive electrical components, and if your PC doesn’t have adequate ventilation – perhaps because the air vents are clogged with dust and hair or blocked by a wall or other object – that can make your system run slower or crash. Excessive heat can also affect a laptop’s battery life. Make sure your air vents are clear, and keep an eye on the temperature inside your PC. Most motherboards allow you to monitor this, and Piriform’s free system-information tool, Speccy (www.piriform.com/speccy), can show you how hot your PC is running. Ideally, it should be around 40-45°C and no more than 60°C. If your computer gets too warm, consider adding more fans or a watercooling system to bring the temperature down.
13 Increasing the number of processor cores
If you open the Windows System Configuration tool (click Start and type msconfig to launch it), then click the Boot tab followed by the ‘Advanced options’ button, you’ll see a box that lets you specify the number of processors (cores) to use during startup. It might seem logical to increase the number of cores here in the hope that it will speed up the boot process (we’ve often seen this advice offered on the web), but actually you’ll see no benefit at all. This feature is intended to let users limit the number of cores Windows uses at bootup for testing purposes. Under normal circumstances, the operating system uses whatever cores are available without your input.
14 Relying on ReadyBoost for extra speed
Windows ReadyBoost – a feature that was introduced in Vista and is still available in Windows 10 – lets you use one or more USB flash drives as a cache for the Windows swap file. Look online for ways to speed up your PC, and you’ll often find ReadyBoost in the list of suggestions. To use it, you simply insert a blank memory stick into a spare port (not a hub), click Speed Up My System and select the option to dedicate the device to ReadyBoost.
However, although ReadyBoost can improve performance on a slow PC that has limited memory (512MB or 1GB, for example), most systems are likely to see no speed increase whatsoever. In the rare instance that you might benefit from using ReadyBoost – perhaps because you’re working on a laptop with a low specification – you should make sure you insert a fast USB drive because using a slow device (the minimum speed that Microsoft will allow) won’t give you much of a performance boost at all. It’s also worth pointing out that ReadyBoost is only useful on systems that have mechanical hard drives, not SSDs – which are fast enough already.
SOFTWARE SLIP-UPS
15 Loading resource-hungry startup items
Many programs set themselves to start as soon as Windows boots up, which can really increase the time the operating system takes to get into a usable state. Although you’ll obviously want your antivirus program to load at startup, other programs, such as Java Update Scheduler and Google Installer, aren’t essential and simply slow down the boot process. They also run in the background once the PC has started, using resources unnecessarily.
You can manage Windows startup directly in the operating system, or use a third-party tool such as CCleaner, but before you start disabling programs, you need to find out which are having the most impact and slowing things down. In Windows 10, press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to open the Task Manager and click the ‘More details’ link. Click the ‘Start-up’ tab at the top, then click Status to show a list of Enabled items. The column on the right shows how much of an impact each of the launch items is having on your PC’s boot time. You can disable any that are marked High by selecting them and clicking the Disable button. Only remove those you know you don’t need to start alongside Windows.
Monitor Windows 10 using Task Manager
1 Open the Task Manager by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc, or right-clicking the taskbar and selecting it there. The basic view shows only the programs that are currently running. Select one you don’t want (or that’s frozen) and click ‘End task’ to terminate it. Click the ‘More details’ link to expand the view.
2 The Processes tab shows all the processes (from programs and Windows) that are currently running. If your system seems a little slow, check the CPU and Memory columns to see if a particular process is consuming too many resources. You can reorder the list by clicking a heading. Terminate any misbehaving items.
3 The Performance tab lets you keep a closer eye on your system’s hardware, including CPU, memory, hard disks and network. Select an item in the column on the left. Doubleclicking the graph expands it and hides all other information. Rightclicking the CPU graph lets you inspect individual processor cores.
16 Ignoring hidden System Tray items
If you don’t keep Windows startup in check, you may end up with too many programs running simultaneously and hogging your computer’s resources without you even realising it. Click the arrow in your system tray to open the notifications area, and you may be surprised by how many programs are running. Disable any you don’t need, then remove them from Windows startup.
17 Overlooking wasteful processes
You can use the built-in Windows Resource Monitor to get an in-depth overview of Windows’ system performance and start, stop, suspend and resume non-essential processes and services. As well as detailed information on CPU, memory, drive and network usage, the program usefully analyses ‘wait chains’ to identify why an application isn’t responding, so you can kill the process that’s causing the problem. To run the tool, click Start and type resmon into the search box. Right-click a program and choose Analyse Wait Chain to find out what’s slowing it down.
18 Using the wrong security software
When a computer starts to run really slowly, one of the first things many users think of is a malware infection. Having an antivirus program installed keeps your PC safe from such problems, but it’s not uncommon for users to mistrust their existing security software and call on another tool for a second opinion. Antimalware programs can be very resource-heavy and cause your PC to run slower than it should – and having more than one installed can compound the problem.
The trick is to choose the right anti-malware tool for your system. If you have a powerful modern PC, you can run the likes of Kaspersky Internet Security 2016 (www.kaspersky.co.uk) without the system getting bogged down, but if you have an older computer, you’re better off using a less demanding program such as Avira Antivirus Pro 2016 (www.avira.com), which did well in recent tests by AV Comparatives (www.av-comparatives.org).
If you require a second opinion, use a rescue CD (all the main security software companies now offer these) that you can boot into, and which won’t affect your system’s performance.
19 Failing to deselect junk extras
Although your virus program can protect you from all sorts of malware, it probably won’t stop you accidentally installing the junk that’s often bundled sneakily with free software. Getting rid of this can be a nightmare – uninstalling it usually involves jumping through hoops, and some programs make it almost impossible. Pay careful attention when installing a program, and don’t be fooled by greyed out Decline buttons that – despite appearances – are fully clickable. Use the brilliant Unchecky (unchecky.com) to stay safe by automatically declining unwanted and unrelated ‘offers’ in installers.
20 Using outdated hardware drivers
Drivers enable your PC to control the hardware that’s installed in or attached to it, and old, outdated or missing drivers can cause problems. Although you can look for newer versions of drivers manually on each hardware manufacturer’s website, or use a specific tool (graphics cards usually come with a control panel for this purpose), a simpler solution is to use the free program Driver Booster (bit.ly/booster391). This scans your system and provides you with links to newer drivers for your PC.
Speed up your system using Driver Booster 3
1 Run Driver Booster and it will get to work, scanning your system for missing and outdated drivers. The banner at the top shows the number of device drivers available to update. You’ll see the list of old drivers below. These are colour coded so you can tell how old they are.
2 To download and install the latest version of a driver, click the Update button beside it. Click the down arrow to the right of the button to access additional options. You can view the driver’s details, update it, roll back changes, uninstall it, ignore it and export the list for later reference.
3 You can also update drivers in batches by selecting the ones you want and clicking the Update Now button. You may need to disable your antivirus software temporarily before doing this. You can view all the drivers on your system under the UpToDate tab. Click the menu button to configure the software.
21 Changing the page-file size
When Windows needs more memory than is installed in your PC, it starts reading and writing data to ‘virtual memory’ instead. This is actually a reserved area of the hard drive called the page file. Windows manages the page file’s size automatically, although it gives you the option to set it manually if you prefer. You can even disable it completely if you believe you have enough RAM installed to make it unnecessary. However, just because you can, that doesn’t mean you should. Windows knows what it’s doing here, and can be trusted to manage its own virtual memory use without your help. If your PC has a decent amount of memory installed, Windows is unlikely to use the page file much anyway, so don’t worry about it.