Not everything you’re told is worth listening to…
There are many thousands of people who want to speed up their PC, so it’s no surprise there’s a small industry around telling people how to do it. The problem is that not everyone is trying to offer genuine solutions. In many cases, they’re just cannibalising lists of recommendations from other websites. But spotting bad advice can be hard, especially if you’re not that technically inclined. That’s why we’ve collected together the least helpful examples we’ve seen so you know not to waste your time.
Myth 1: Your PC Is Slow Because Of Malware
While some kinds of malware can have a severe effect on a system, it’s usually quite obvious if you’ve been infected with a program that’s stealing your resources. Most malware infections actually don’t want to utilise your resources too heavily, because their goal is to stay hidden for as long as possible. With the exception of botnet backdoors and cryptocurrency miners, most modern malware won’t impact performance in any great way.
A properly maintained PC should be free of malware anyway, and while it doesn’t cause any harm to remain vigilant and perform regular scans, the fact is that computers slow down even if you use them normally. Deciding that malware is to blame might send you on a wild goose chase at best and result in unnecessary expenses at worst!
If you want to make sure, all you have to do is run a full scan with your preferred anti-virus program. AVG Free (free.avg.com) is always a good choice and will give you a fairly good impression of whether there’s anything to worry about. If it doesn’t find any malware, then you’re probably free and don’t have to worry about it being the cause of your slow system.
Myth 2: Upgrading Is The Way To A Definite Speed Increase
While we can’t deny that a new processor, more RAM or a bigger hard drive has a good chance of speeding up your system as soon as it’s installed, that doesn’t mean it definitely will. If your hard drive speed or capacity is what’s causing your system bottleneck, no amount of extra processing speed will help. Similarly, if you already have 8GB of RAM, another 8GB isn’t going to make much difference in the grand scheme of things.
One of the things to remember is that slowdown isn’t caused by components wearing out, so replacing them isn’t going to make much of a difference, if any. Slowdown tends to come from the software and operating system. Admittedly, the problem might be that the software and operating system need access to better hardware or more resources, but that’s not the same thing as your current hardware being inadequate.
If you want your upgrades to affect system speed, it’s better to look for upgrades that aren’t simply iterations of your current hardware. Replacing your existing Ivy Bridge processor with a better Ivy Bridge processor probably won’t give you the improvements you’d get from upgrading to a Haswell CPU. No matter how high-speed or high-capacity your new hard drive is, an SSD will be faster.
If you do have a good idea of what’s making your system slower than you’d like, then an upgrade can be a way of solving that problem. Just don’t think that money is a magic bullet that’ll solve all your problems!
Myth 3: The Registry Needs Cleaning
Perhaps the biggest and most persistent PC maintenance myth is that you need to clean out your registry and that doing so will speed up your system. While it’s true that the registry can balloon in size with age, no one has ever conclusively proven that this has anything but the most tiny, barely noticeable effect on a system’s overall speed.
The reality is that any slowdowns you can measure which do result from registry clutter are normally related to larger registry files becoming fragmented, rather than the size of the registry itself being the problem. Every registry entry occupies only bytes. You’d need to have thousands and thousands of unused ones to see even a tiny delay in registry access.
For some reason, these facts haven’t stopped hundreds of companies making ‘registry cleaning’ applications, which claim to make all sorts of improvements simply by stripping the unused bits out of the registry. In reality, while they might delete some junk, there’s a bigger (but still miniscule) chance that they’ll do more harm than good. Deleting unused stuff from the registry has almost no effect on a system, but if the registry gets corrupted as a result of improper handling, then it’s probably game over for your system.
Ultimately, the reason the registry-cleaning industry has doesn’t so well isn’t because it works; it’s because on the surface, it seems to make sense that a less cluttered registry would mean a faster system, and the psychological power of the idea is enough to make people translate no effect into a small positive one.
Myth 4: Upgrading Windows Will Speed Up Your System
Upgrading Windows is a long, involved, often difficult process, but lots of people think it’s worth the time for the speed increase that their computer gets as a result. Only you can’t be sure you actually will get one from doing it.
In many situations, it’s true that a clean Windows installation will give your system the refresh it needs to get back up to full speed. But again, it depends what the cause of the slowdown is. Upgrading Windows won’t fix problems related to hard drive capacity and will probably make them worse. Ditto for problems caused by a lack of RAM. Every version of Windows requires more resources than the previous one, so while you might see a speed increase from having a fresh operating system it’ll be illusory. You’d see just as much (if not more) of an improvement by doing a reinstall of your current operating system – which is a drastic, but almost always effective measure.
And if you really want to see a boost? Try installing a lowresource operating system, such as Linux. It’s not one novices should attempt, but if you’ve ever managed a reinstall of Windows you’ve probably got the chops you need to install a copy of Linux. And whatever approach you take, just make sure you’ve backed up your files beforehand!
Ultimately, the process of speeding up a PC is rarely a quick or easy one. If something is being advertised as giving instant and certain benefits, it’s probably trying to pull a fast one. The golden rule is that you don’t tend to speed up a PC by adding something to it, whether that’s hardware or software. Most speed problems come from a build-up of software and files, and in the end, you can get rid of those on your own.