Sure, Windows 7 is much faster than slowpoke Vista, but there’s still room for improvement. Here are a dozen tricks to that can make Windows 7 faster.
via Help – 12 Tips to Speed Up Windows 7 Tips, Solutions & How Tos | PCMag.com.
Notes from the Computer Scientist- Andrew here to verify that these are all very good suggestions, and most apply to XP and Vista as well. I’ve done a lot of installs, reinstalls and general IT for friends and family over the last year and these are all things I have done. I want to call special attention to these three:
- Search Indexing: This one is classic, and a great tweak for XP and Vista too. It’s a huge resource hog, largely irrelevant for most users, and completely off the average user’s radar. Join the IT crowd and turn this one off.
- More RAM: An appropriate amount of RAM makes a huge difference. This is especially worth investigating if you’ve upgraded to Windows 7 from XP on an older machine. I say “appropriate amount” because you don’t want to go buying new parts for your computer if RAM is not the cause of your trouble; once you have enough, more of it doesn’t do you any good. For average computing I’d say you want at least 1GB and 2GB is probably better. If this is a machine with graphics intensive applications, (this goes for games as well as *ahem* maybe dental imaging software), 4GB is probably where you want to be.
- Defragmenting your Hard-Drive: If you’ve had a computer for a few years and just swear it used to run faster chances are you need to defragment your hard-drive. You will probably be embarrassed by the performance gain afterwards. Windows 7, however, hasn’t been out long enough for anybody’s hard-drive to be too far gone yet, but it’s still a good preventative measure, (The effects of fragmentation happen gradually so that you don’t even notice). I don’t recommend the Windows default defragger though. Try this free one and run its “Monthly Optimize” option; you might be amazed at how your computer runs afterwards.
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