Spontaneous Serendipity

After struggling with sluggish performance of my laptop for a long time, last week I finally devoted few hours and some efforts to fix it. And, I would say I am impressed with the little tricks that I learned which improve performance.  Listed below are few things that all PC owners should perform at least once in 3 months of daily use:

1. Defragmentation: Fragmentation of hard disk is the biggest culprit.  Make sure you defrag your drives as frequently as sanely possible. I recommend using a defrag software that does auto-defrag and a lot of other things in background whenever your PC is idle, I like DisKeeper.

2. Clean up you Registry:  Clean up your registry once in 3 months using any free/paid SW like RegistryVictor.

3. Create a New Profile: This is a tricky one, not recommended for rookies. Take a back up of your settings/favorites/Outlook rules/etc and then, reboot your PC in safe mode. Go to your user profile folder (dont try this if you dont know where profile folder is!) and rename it to something else (like X.orig) . Reboot in normal mode. Next time you login, Windows would recreate a new profile folder for you. When you login, you’d notice that all your settings would be gone. But, I bet that you’d notice improved performance.  Restore settings/favorites/Outlook rules/etc. Copy Desktop, My document, etc from your old renamed profile folder. Just be careful to copy only the things you need to avoid bringing in the reason that slowed your PC in the first place. Use your PC for few days or when you are sure you’ve copied everything you needed,  just delete the old renamed folder. This you could do once in six months.

4. Run windows “Disk Cleanup” to delete Temp files.

5. Delete Junk: RegistryVictor also deletes the junk getting accumulated or do it yourself.

Note: No matter what your PC configurations are, unless you perform at least few of the things mentioned here, you computer WILL slow down with usage.