Computer Advice

Every installation of Windows will eventually slow down and start running slower than usual. This happens for many reason and in this article, we discuss ways you can speed up your system.

Windows has several option user can use to alter the various ways windows utilises your system.

Turn off Windows indexing service

The windows indexing service is potentially unnecessary. Disabling the indexing services will reduce the hard drive use on your computer and thus speeds up Windows. The Windows Indexing Service will catalogue the contents of your hard disk including the contents of files, to make local searching faster. This is great if you forget the name of a file for example, as you can search the content so if you were for instance, writing a word document about “blue widgets”, windows will search for blue widgets in the content of the file as well as file names.

Defragging your hard drive regularly

Defragging your hard drive regularly will speed up your Windows installation. With the release of Windows 7, defragging has become much easier as it has a fully functional defragmentation tool that can be set to run on automatic or manual. The defrag program works by organizing the content of your hard disks in a logical order and hence speeding up read write time on your hard disk as the drive head has to do less work.

Turning off the Aero Theme

The aero theme for Windows 7 makes it visually stunning but it is also a resource hog. If your PC is new, this won’t make much of a difference to you, but for older systems, the aero theme can cripple a slower PC. To turn the theme off, right click your desktop and select Personalization and choose Windows 7 Basic from the options. Obviously, the basic theme uses much less system recourses and can greatly speed up Windows if you have a slower graphics card and little system ram.

Adding more system memory

Adding more ram can also greatly increase your systems performance. Installing more ram in your system means windows can utilise this much faster memory for storing the programs you run. If Windows runs out of ram, its starts to use your hard drive as virtual ram which is much much slower a will make your PC crawl. There are a couple of issues when adding more ram to your system. 32 bit versions of windows have a memory limit of 3.5GB, so adding any more becomes pointless. 64 bit versions have much higher limit of 192 GB. Some older PC will only have a limited number of ram slots, again reducing the amount you can physically install in your system.

Windows Vista definitely wasn’t going to win any awards from the thousands of computer users who were experiencing critical problems with the new operating system. The negative feedback sent Microsoft into an immediate counter attack and the result of their efforts to create something better, something far more reliable and toned down resulted in Windows 7.

Windows Vista had incredibly demanding specifications that required decent graphics cards, heavy amounts of ram, strong CPU’s and other hardware components that a lot of computers are lacking. Fortunately, Windows 7 improved upon these complex system requirements and toned down the operating system to allow older computers to get in on the new exciting features. In fact, some consumers have reported running Windows 7 on PC’s with as little as 512MB of RAM. While this is obviously not recommended as Microsoft clearly has suggested at least 1GB of RAM, it does provide some evidence that they effectively made a reliable operating system that can function with lower standard materials. Some of the reports suggesting that Windows 7 ran fine on 512MB also stated that it seemed to over perform Windows XP. Windows XP was released quite some time ago and the fact that computers designed for XP can run more smoothly with Windows 7 is extraordinary.

Windows Vista also had several technological difficulties that disallowed users from accessing certain points within the operating system. These challenges have been overcome since the introduction of Windows 7. While Windows 7 still limits your access to certain parts of the computer, warning you if you’re about to enter a secured location, these capabilities are necessary to prevent basic computer users from altering files they shouldn’t be. Secondly, Windows 7 took away the unfortunate administration issues that Vista was facing. Many users reported software problems when attempting to launch programs as a regular user, rather than as an administrator.