Have you noticed your PC or Laptop is starting to crawl along. Are you having to sit and wait for your PC to get it’s things together? With a few easy steps you can clean out, tune up and give a new lease of life to your machine.

Step 1:

Speed issues can often be attributed to virus’ or malware of some kind. Give you machine a thorough scan with several antivirus or antimalware tools. Orbits currently recommend the following:

AntiVirus:

Microsoft Security Essentials: Security Essentials is a free AV offering from the big boys at Microsoft. Its unobtrusive, is not resource heavy and just sits there and does its job. Download, update and scan and let the software do the rest.

Anti Malware:

MalwareBytes AntiMalware: There are a great many antimalware tools available online and it is worth running a few of them as they all target different threats. MalwareBytes’ offering is our prefered choice if you are only going to run one bit of software. Its lightweight, constantly updated and catches the majority of threats.Download, update, scan and let the software do the rest.

Reboot your system and see if things have improved.

Step 2:

Over time you will find that your PC or laptop accumulates rubbish. Whether this be old programs you never use, backup files that are no longer valid or duplicate files you no longer need.

Orbits recommend that you go to Control Panels/Add or Remove Programs (Win XP) or Control Panels/Software/Uninstall (Vista/Win 7) and remove any programs you no longer use.  If you are unsure of what any programs are on the list then speak to us before you remove anything.

The step above should cut down on the old, redundant programs, now its time to remove junk files etc. Piriform.com offer some excellent free tools for system maintenance. The one we are looking for today is CCleaner (Any guess what the C stands for?!). This tool will scan your system for C**p and give you the option to remove it. It is usually pretty good at only finding files which it is 100% safe to remove but if you are in any doubt call us before you select remove. It will also remove your Internet cookies etc so be aware you may need to login to websites etc again.

Download, install (make sure you take the tick out of the Yahoo toolbar install option unless you particularly want another browser addon installed) and scan. Read through the results and when happy click remove. CCleaner also features a good registry cleaner as well but if you start to mess with the registry bad things can quickly happen so be careful with that.

Reboot and see how things go.

Step 3:

Now we have cleared out the virus’, malware, old programs and c**p we can look at what is starting up and or running on your system and may be slowing it down. A lot of programs force themselves to be started when you start your system. Programs that you may not even want to use regularly. For every program that loads itself at start up, thats a bit less memory you have to make things run smoothly.

Click start and run and type in msconfig hit enter and you will get the System Configuration program. Again there are some things in here that could really cause you headaches so try not to mess to much! Click on the Startup Tab (2nd from right) and you will see a list of programs that starts when windows does. You should be able to go down this list and untick anything you don’t want starting up. Most common things are Office startup, adobe updater, java updater etc. You can safely disable these at startup and free some precious resources! Once again, anything you are unsure of please check before disabling.

Once you have made the changes click OK and it will ask you to restart your machine. Go ahead and when it starts back up you will get a notice saying something along the lines of ‘you have made changes to your system configuration..’. Just tick the box which says ‘Don’t show me this again’ and OK and it will never bother you again (until you make some more changes in MSCONFIG!)

Hopefully with those 3 steps above, your system will be a bit more responsive and do things just that little bit faster. If you are still having speed issues then give us a call for assistance.