Basics

• The first places to look are the hard drive and desktop. If your hard drive is near full, it takes longer for it to find what you're looking for, which slows down the performance. Get everything you can off the hard drive, either to another external hard drive or on CDs or DVDs. Anything you don't use routinely should go. You might even find you have multiple copies of the same files you don't need. Put all nonessential data on external media (preferably twice so you have a back up), verify the data is there and working and then dump it all from the hard drive. If your desktop is full of files and folders, that too makes the computer run slower. If you need all of them, create a folder in the hard drive and move everything there. A cluttered desktop also creates other problems, so this should be done routinely.
  
  

Software

• After backing up your entire hard drive, run an optimization program on it. As time goes on, data---even programs---have their bytes scattered all around the hard drive. This makes the computer run slower because it takes more time to access scattered data than it does contiguous data. An optimization program will sort all this fragmentation out and put everything back together in contiguous format. The first time you do this, it might take a while, but if you optimize on the schedule recommended by your software---usually once a month or so---it won't take long because the data does not have time to get as scattered.
  
  

Hardware

• If you still need to make your computer faster, it's time to move into hardware upgrades. The costliest is a processor upgrade. Usually, the price will be high enough to make it more worthwhile to simply buy a new computer, but if you can do it yourself and get a used but faster processor, it might be worth it. Far less expensive and easier to do is to replace the hard drive with a newer, faster, larger one. If you have an older 5,400 RPM hard drive that has a 40GB capacity, think about moving up to at least 7,200 RPM and 500GB. Hard drives are reaching higher still with 10,000 and 15,000 RPM available, but even the 7,200 will make a difference in computer speed. There are guides online about how to change hard drives. Another way to increase computer speed is to upgrade the random-access memory (RAM) to maximum. Unless you order a computer with maximum RAM, it rarely comes with the full load to keep costs down. RAM chips, however, are readily available and generally cost less than having the manufacturer install them. Check your total RAM and what its maximum capacity is. If you have 512MG of RAM and your capacity is 2GB, get two 1GB RAM chips and install them. Speed will increase and the heat generated by the computer will be reduced from this and the hard drive replacement.