Tips To Speed Up An Old Laptop
Has your old laptop slowed down to a crawl as of late? Tips To Speed Up An Old Laptop
Whether it has happened over time or suddenly, working with a slow and unresponsive laptop is always a hair-pulling experience.
A laptop that’s used to be snappy and fast is now operating at a glacial pace. Like with pretty much everything, time will eventually catch up with our old electronics.
Of course, we all know that, but we just don’t want it to happen so soon.
Before you go and trade in your laptop for a new one, you should check out our 6 tips to speed up your old laptop.
Update Hardware Driver To Solid State Driver
Updating your drivers is essential when it comes to PC maintenance. Upgrading your system to a solid-state drive (SSD) is another great way to make your computer run like a younger machine. Modern computers can do this pretty easily.
You can replace a hard drive with an SSD on Windows computers without having to reinstall your operating system.
If your drivers are corrupted or outdated, some of the devices in your laptop may not work properly and may even stop working altogether.
Keeping your device drivers updated is a good way to ensure optimal hardware performance. Windows has a built-in driver update tool but it can be rather confusing and unintuitive to use.
If you want a hassle-free method to update drivers, it’s highly recommended that you Give DriverSupport | ONE a try today!. This driver utility tool will scan your laptop for outdated drivers and will automatically download and install the latest driver versions.
Free Up Hard Drive Space
Freeing up space on your hard drive is an easy way to improve your computer’s performance. Over-cluttered hard drives slow computers down and are a burden that you should unload.
Start with going over the largest programs and data that takes up the most space individually. Then work your way down to smaller files.
You’d be surprised how much space is taken up by things you’d never use again.
Delete Unnecessary Files
Handy tip: Hard drives generally work at peak speed until they reach about 90% capacity. Therefore, if your laptop has less than 10% capacity, there’s a good chance it’s slowing your laptop down.
Take a look at your files and delete the ones you don’t need to free up some space. In addition, you may also use Windows’ Disk Cleanup utility to delete junk files such as old Windows installations and temporary files.
If you can’t afford to delete large but important files from your laptop, you may want to invest in an external storage device for backing up your files.
Memory Upgrade
Clearing memory space only goes so far. You can do that for quite a while, but eventually you will run out of disk space.
When this happens, you’ll be faced with the choice of buying a new computer or preserving your old one by adding a new hard drive to make more storage space.
This is a perceptive idea, especially for those who are cost conscious or partial to their old machine.
Scan for Viruses and Malware
One of the major causes of computer problems are viruses and malware, which many computer owners are unaware of could cause your laptop or PC to run slow and malfunction.
Different from the viruses and malware programs that immediately flash on the screen alerting the user, malignant programs work behind the scenes and are only detected of sluggish speeds and other performance problems.
Run a full scan of your system using antivirus software or malware detector, or both. When it comes to viruses and malware, prevention is always the best approach. Therefore, make sure that you keep your antivirus and malware programs up to date.
Adjust or Disable Visual Effects
Recent versions of Windows have fancy visual effects and animations that can severely affect a laptop’s performance.
Thankfully, adjusting or disabling these graphics and animations is easy. Simply input sysdm.cpl in the Search box.
Navigate to the Advanced tab and click Settings under Performance.
From here, you can enable or disable some visual effects and animations by Windows.
Selecting Adjust for best performance should get the job done by removing all visual effects.
Delete Windows Programs You Don’t Use
While it’s tempting to hoard apps and programs just in case you’ll use them in the future, it’s really not a good idea.
Keeping programs that you don’t use can slow down your laptop since they use precious resources and processing power. There are even programs that quietly run in the background.
Audit your applications and programs and uninstall the ones that you don’t need anymore. This way, you’ll be freeing up precious resources.
Prevent Programs from Running on Startup
Many apps are designed to launch automatically as Windows boots up. If you have too many programs running at launch, you’ll notice that your laptop takes forever to boot up.
Limit your startup programs to the ones that you can actually need. For instance, having an antivirus program launch during startup makes sense.
On the other hand, do you really need apps like Spotify or iTunes to run as soon as you boot up your laptop?
Bring up the Task Manager by using the Ctrl + Shift + Escape shortcut command. Click the Startup tab and you can view and set which programs should run on startup.
Reinstall Your Operating System
If you’ve had the same OS for a long time, and you’re trying to repurpose an old computer to make it into a specific tool, it may be easier just to scrap the entire install and start with a fresh copy of Windows.
Make sure to save your Windows License Key on paper or another device before wiping it down. When you start back up, you can use a tool like Driver Support to update all of your drivers to keep it functioning, especially if it may not have a keyboard or mouse attached, or if it is going to be headless.
Extend Your Laptop’s Life
With our how to guide on increasing the speed of your old laptop, you should be able to squeeze more life and performance from your trusty old laptop.
Update Your Drivers
Perhaps the best thing you can do for your old computer is update all of its device drivers. Driver Support is the best choice on the market for updating your devices drivers and fixing old computer speeds.
Speed up your computer with Driver Support’s spectacular software. Instead of updating the drivers yourself, use Driver Support to detect and update all device drivers automatically.
Driver Support Can Refresh Your Computer
Do the right thing for your old computer and give it the boost it needs with Driver Support.
Established in 1996, Driver Support has been helping people just like you for over 20 years. Install the software and enjoy a computer that runs almost as it did when you took it out of the box.
Give DriverSupport | ONE a try today! for your computer today and enjoy a smooth running machine without the headaches of performing manual updates.
