Four Ways To Make Your Slow Laptop Faster
Posted on 06. Aug, 2011 by Albert Madison in Guides & Tips, Laptops, Laptops
Does your laptops performance just make you want to scream?
Your laptop isn’t what it used to be, just to get booted up to a working home screen takes minutes. This isn’t uncommon it’s bound to happen, especially if you aren’t doing regular maintenance (which most people don’t). There are plenty of different things you can do to help resurrect your laptop to where it used to be if not make it even better than it was, and none of them require you buying a new laptop.
I have outlined four things you can do to make your laptop faster, and three out of the four can be done right now. Check them out below.
1. Upgrade your RAM
Adding more RAM or even adding a brand new set of RAM to your laptop will help boast your sluggish systems performance. The RAM or Random Access Memory in your laptop is what helps make multitasking across many programs smooth, having between 4 and 8 GB’s of RAM in your laptop is ideal this day and age.
When looking to buy RAM for your laptop you will first need to look up the RAM specifications for your laptop. You can find the exact specifications for your system in the official manuals included in the box for your laptop, or you can look-up your particular laptop and find the manual on your manufacturer’s website if you don’t have a physical copy.
Every laptop has support for only one kind of RAM, called SO-DIMM memory. When you’re looking up the information about your systems RAM support you’ll need to keep your eye’s peeled for the two following things:
- Is your laptop DDR, DDR2, or DDR3 compatible
- What type of DDR, DDR2, or DDR3 RAM does your system support e.g. PC2XXX, PC2-XXXX or PC3-XXXX
2. Run malware, spyware and virus scans
Sometimes if you’ve had your laptop for a while you might have picked up something like malware, spyware or even a virus. If your laptop has either one or a mix of each then that could be the cause of your laptops sluggishness. It’s best to just go ahead and scan your entire system to see if it’s infected with anything.
There are some free tools to do the scanning too, check out free software that’s good at finding infections in systems:
- Malware and Spyware tool – Malwarebytes
- Malwarebytes is great free software that can scan your entire computer for malware and spyware and help you remove it too. Malwarebytes is software that I use to do regular scans on all of my computers. You can download Malwarebytes securely and for free from malwarebytes.org.
- Virus Scanner – AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 2011
- AVG is a great anti-virus system that can not only detect viruses but get rid of them too. The software is widely popular and is highly regarded. You can download it securely and free from download.cnet.com.
3. Free up storage on your hard drive
Storage space not being there is also something that can really hold back a laptop. Having your hard drive packed to the gills is never good no matter the computing device you have but for desktop or laptop computers the problem causes serious performance drains and headaches for low or no storage space left as well.
What you can do is clean up your hard drive, if you’ve had your laptop for any considerable amount of time you’ve saved and deleted and so on hundreds if not thousands of times. To clean things up efficiently and effectively there are free software tools, check them out below:
Disk cleanup – This is built-in to your laptop if you have Windows and all you have to do is run it and delete whatever it may find. If you have a Mac you should really check out this guide for cleaning up your Mac OS X boot disc on Thexlab.com.
CCleaner – Free software that scans your main system hard drive (the one with your operating system on it) and lets you decide what you want deleted and not deleted. CCleaner is another piece of free software I use on all of my computers regularly for full system scans as well as efficiently emptying my recycling bin. You can download CCleaner securely and for free on downloads.cnet.com.
4. Add an SSD as a boot drive
Going to a solid state drive (wiki), or really just buying a brand new hard drive, might seem like a daunting task but it really isn’t. SSD’s have become reasonable in price so that you really can buy one and add it as a boot drive for your laptop without breaking past $150.
SSDs use flash memory modules for storage instead of the tradition spinning disk that hard disk drives (HDDs) use. Using that method SSDs consume less power and produce less heat than a standard HDD. Also since they use flash memory SSDs can read and write data a lot quicker than a HDD can (even the 10,000 RPM models).
I currently use an SSD for a boot drive and the performance has been awesome. My computer boots and shuts down in seconds now and opening up any program I have on the SSD is instantaneous. I have a 64GB Crucial RealSSD C300 but since I have a second 1TB HDD the small space doesn’t bother me. However if your laptop only has one hard drive bay you will probably have to buy an external hard drive, if you have to do that prices are currently pretty equal between a HDD and an external hard drive.
When you buy an SSD you should make sure you get data transfer cables and software so that you can easily transfer your OS files to your new SSD instead of having to buy a fresh copy of Windows or Mac OS X.
Related Posts
2 Responses to “Four Ways To Make Your Slow Laptop Faster”
Leave a Reply
Brian
07. Aug, 2011
I would suggest one more alternative- upgrade to a solid state hybrid hard drive. Thses are cost-effective, improve boot up time significantly and give you all the storage of a traditional hard drive.
Kyle
12. Aug, 2011
I would like to reiterate the above comment about hybrid drives. I recently installed a hybrid drive in my gaming PC and it now fully boots into Windows 7 from cold in about 20 seconds!
Also look at which internet security program you use. Some such as Norton are known for using more memory than others. My personal favourite is AVG as well.