Do you have a slow Windows PC? In this article, I will cover basic steps to help you speed up your slow PC. Before you make any changes to your PC, you must be comfortable navigating your computer’s settings. Do not make changes to your computer unless you are comfortable doing so. Otherwise, you may risk disabling features that help to protect your PC. So, if you are not sure what to do, take your PC to your local computer guy. With that said, I want you to know that there are other advanced steps to speed up your slow PC before you get to Windows. However, I will not cover those steps in this article to keep things simple. So, let us get started.

How To Optimize Your Slow PC On Startup

The first step to speed up your slow laptop or desktop PC when starting up Windows is by eliminating unnecessary start up items. As you install more apps on your computer, some programs add themselves to the startup process by default. Nothing except your Anti-virus software and apps that you need to load as Windows starts up needs to be in your computer’s startup items. Having too many Startup Apps can slow Down your PC’s startup. Here is how you fix that:

• Go to the search box or search icon on the taskbar and search for Startup Apps. If the search box or icon are not showing, right-click on the taskbar. If you changed your mouse’s default settings, you may need to left-click to show the menu instead of right-click. See image below for visual aid. Navigate down the menu list to search. Left-click on search and left-click on the show search box option if it is not checked already. The search box should show up on your taskbar now. So go ahead and search for Startup Apps.
• Select Startup Apps from the search results. This should take you to a list of Apps that startup when you turn on your computer.
•  From the list of Apps, turn off anything that has medium impact or high impact on startup, except your security software and any Apps that you want to load when your PC starts. This should help speed up your PC on startup unless your computer has viruses or hardware problems.

How To Optimize Your Computer’s Drives

Another way to speed up a slow computer is by optimizing your computer’s disk or disks. To use an analogy, a computer’s disk is like a sock drawer with different colored or assorted brands of socks. You may have your socks nicely organized and easy to find at first. But if you stop organizing the socks in pairs over time, it will take you longer to find a matching pair of socks, right? A computer works in a similar way. It finds things faster if the resources that it needs are easy to find. This is the purpose of optimizing your computer’s storage drives. Optimizing your computer’s drives is one of the easiest ways to speed up your slow PC. Here is how you optimize your computer’s drives:

• Go to the search box on the taskbar just like you do to find the Startup Apps.
• Search for Defragment and Optimize Drives and select the matching results. The Optimize Drives window should popup.
• Select the disk that you want to optimize from the list and then click on the optimize button to run disk optimization. This can help to speed up your slow laptop or desktop computer if there are no major problems with your computer.   
• You can schedule disk optimization to run weekly if this option is not already set by default.

If the steps above do not help to speed up your slow computer, take your computer to your local trusted computer expert for additional help. A slow computer can be a sign of a serious computer-related problem. If your computer is older than three years, or someone spilled liquid on it, you want to back up anything important if you know how to do a computer back up. Otherwise take it into your local computer shop. As I mentioned earlier, there are other ways to speed up your slow computer, but those usually require a bit more technical expertise. If you live within Clark County, Washington or the Portland Oregon Metropolitan area and you need help speeding up your slow PC, check out PC Rescue Wiz.