Assuming the memories aren't wishful thinking, there's a bit you can
do to clear out the cobwebs and get your computer running up to speed
again, both on the hardware and the software side.
So before you pull the plug and buy a new PC, here are a few things you can do to possibly recover some lost speed.
Clear out the dust
Dust build up over time can impede airflow, and airflow is vital for
keeping system temperatures down. If your system overheats, it'll likely
throttle its performance down to cope.
Cleaning out the dust is easier if you've got a desktop rather than a
laptop — you can still clear the dust away from vents in the laptop,
but be wary about opening it up to do a thorough clean, as depending on
the vendor this may invalidate your warranty. If you're out of warranty,
and you're confident of
navigating the maze in most laptops, go for it.
The first step is to remove general dust from around the system. You
could use a moist paper towel and cotton buds to get into
harder-to-reach areas, but one of the best tools you can employ is a can
of compressed air. Make sure to avoid vacuum cleaners — or at least
getting overzealous with them. We've known people to have sucked
capacitors right off the board. There are other issues with using a
vacuum cleaner, too, as
Brian Cooley of CNET tells us:
...you might be tempted to stick a vacuum-cleaner hose inside and
suck out the dust. Don't. Vacuums create static electricity, which is
deadly to sensitive electronic components.
On that same note, don't be tempted to reverse the flow of your
vacuum and blow the dust out of the computer. The dust inside a
household vacuum can be harmful to your health, and you'll be spreading
it all over your PC. Also, you risk blowing out sizable particles, which
could physically damage internal components, especially if you're using
a workshop vacuum. The beauty of compressed air is that it's clean and
particle-free.
Before you start blasting, unplug your computer and take it outside —
or at least to your garage. Now, working from the top down, blow out
all that dust (put on a dust mask, unless you want a face full of grime)
... be sure to spray air in short bursts, keeping the can upright and
the tube at least a couple of inches from the hardware.
Next, you'll want to get your fans and heatsinks clean. Cooley has some tips here, too:
Start by powering down your PC, removing the case lid and locating
the various fans. Starting with the power supply, blow through the
internal slits from inside the chassis, aiming so dust will exit the
back.
Next, blow into the intake fan (if there is one) to push more dust
out the back. Finally, blow the blades of the rear exhaust fan clean. If
possible, aim just beneath the centre, where the motor meets the fan
assembly, and blast again. Repeat the process for each fan, keeping the
can upright at all times.
Now restart your PC, and while the fans are spinning, spray them once more — very briefly — to really send the dust flying.
If a fan continues grinding or ticking after you've cleaned it, there's a chance that you can always add
extra lubrication. But if this is one step too far, you could always
just replace it.
Reseat the CPU and GPU heatsinks
This is more applicable for the desktop, but the same basic principles apply for a laptop.
There's a small possibility that the thermal conduction between your
CPU or GPU and its heatsink isn't optimal, causing things to overheat.
If you want to make sure that things are fine, you're going to need some
isopropyl alcohol and
thermal compound.
Firstly, make sure that the heatsink is attached via mounting holes
to the circuit board, rather than directly to the chip. If it appears as
if there's no obvious way that the heatsink is held down on the chip,
it's using thermal glue or
thermal tape to form the bond. If this is the case, ignore and move on, it's unlikely these are causing you issues.
After separating the heatsink from the processor, you'll notice some
goop that was last used as a thermal interface. Clean it away by
applying a small amount of isopropyl alcohol to a clean cloth and
rubbing it until it's gone. Apply a thin but consistent veneer of new
thermal paste across the top of the chip (application can be made easier
by using a scalpel or old credit card to spread the paste), then
reapply the heatsink.
Check your RAM and hard drive
There's every chance that your hardware may not be performing to spec, whether through some kind of fault or mere age.
To make sure everything's running as it should, there are quite a few
software tools you can use first before you go on an upgrading rampage,
or file a warranty claim. Primarily, though, you'll want to check your
memory and your hard drive.
MemTest86+ will cover the memory side, ultimately giving you a bootable DVD or USB key to work with to make sure your RAM has no errors.
You might also want to check the
SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) details of your hard drive.
DiskCheckup will do the job for you — head to the
SMART Info tab and make sure all the entries in the
Status column read
OK. You may also want to perform a
Disk Self Test. If either of these reveal problems, it's time to back up your hard drive and get a new one.
Solid-state drives
If you have an older SSD (say, from 2009 or older) that doesn't support
TRIM (a command that ensures
write amplification is minimised),
it may very well have degraded in performance due to extended use. The
quickest way to return performance is to secure erase it — but, of
course, this requires backing things up, and if your SSD is your system
drive it's not for the faint of heart. If you're sure that you're not
getting the speeds you should out of your SSD, most SSD vendors provide
their own refresh tools, or if you want to do it manually there's a
guide
here to help you on your way.
Uninstall everything you don't use
No, really, everything; browser toolbars, programs you forgot about,
games you didn't finish. See that system tray in the bottom right
stuffed to the gills? Thin it down.
Be sensible — leave things like Windows updates and hardware drivers.
If you're not sure what something is, grab a friendly geek or leave it
alone.
While you could use Windows' in-built uninstaller, something like
IObit Installer will allow you to somewhat automate the process by queuing a whole lot of uninstalls at once.
For most Mac apps (Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite are
notable exceptions), you can uninstall apps purely by dragging them from
the Applications folder into the trash, and emptying it.
Make more space
Hard drives cope better with a bit of free space (as a general rule,
10 per cent free should keep things happy). There are two easy ways you
can help get rid of things if you've been a bit of a digital pack-rat.
CCleaner
will help clear away temporary files created by web browsers, install
programs and more — and if you haven't done this for a long time (or
ever), it can actually make a huge difference. If you're on a Mac, try
OnyX.
Space Sniffer,
meanwhile, will help you to weed out downloads and files you forgot
existed, by showing you a spatial view of what's taking up the most room
on your hard drive, allowing you to drill down to the file level, and
still access Explorer's right-click menu to delete files. Don't forget
you can double click on a folder to zoom in on its contents.
Defrag
This is mainly a Windows thing. While it won't have that much impact on a modern system, and should absolutely
not be performed on an SSD, defragging a hard drive could potentially give you that little extra speed boost you're after.
Under Windows XP you can find the defrag tool by right-clicking on your hard drive in Windows Explorer, selecting
Properties and then the
Tools tab. Click the
Defragment Now... button to open the Disk Defragmenter, then click the
Defragment button. This can take a
long time depending on the size of your storage, so it's best to let it go overnight.
Windows 7 is easier — just click the Windows orb in the bottom left and type
defrag, and the Disk Defragmenter application will appear. Click on it, select the hard drive you wish to defrag and then click
Defragment Disk.
Get a faster antivirus program
Do you run antivirus? Is it old? Some companies of late have really
focused on getting system impact as small as it can get, notably
Symantec, whose Norton software is now incredibly trim, but is still
fighting its old reputation for bloatware.
Performance impact is a
tricky metric to cover; however, for best overall performance and speed we recommend
Bitdefender Total Security 2012, followed by
Norton Internet Security 2012.
If you're of the free mindset,
AVG Anti-Virus Free 2012 provided the lowest average system impact in our tests once scan time was taken into account.
Run a full scan, protect yourself
While we're at it, let's make sure there's no malware on the system that
could be slowing your machine down. Run a full scan through your
antivirus program, then install
Spybot Search and Destroy, update and then do a full scan there, too. Run an immunisation when the scan is done, and if you want to be doubly sure, grab
SpywareBlaster as well, update and then perform an immunisation there as well.
Update, update, update
Ensure that both Windows and your hardware drivers are up to date —
apart from bug fixes, which should make your system work better, you may
be getting new features as well. Graphics card drivers in particular
should be kept up to date, as performance improvements are introduced
frequently.
One tip: don't use the drivers provided by Windows update. These are
often cut down, or sometimes don't even work. Go straight to your
hardware vendor (be it Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Creative, Realtek, Marvell,
Dell, whatever) for the official software.
XP users can run Windows update by visiting
update.microsoft.com, Windows 7 and Vista users can use the in-built Windows Update application.
For OS X, just click the Apple icon at the top left and select
Software Update.
Don't forget your browsers
While you're at it, update your browsers as well, especially if you're
running Internet Explorer 6. Not only will updating your browser get you
new features and bring you in line with the latest standards, allowing
websites to render properly; optimisations are being made to JavaScript
engines all the time, making modern websites faster.
Upgrade hardware individually
If you can determine
what part is the bottleneck in your
system, a simple upgrade will be much cheaper than getting a whole new
system. With laptops, your options here are pretty much limited to RAM,
hard drive and wireless card, but desktop users will have a little more
room to play with.
RAM
If you've got less than 4GB of RAM, investigate adding more — with more
moving online, and browsers being particularly memory hungry, having
more memory is never a bad thing.
Just be aware that if you have 4GB RAM or more, you'll need a 64-bit
operating system in order to recognise and use it all — which for some
people still running XP might mean an operating system upgrade as well.
Hard drive
The hard disk is typically the slowest part of the computer. When
loading data or if you run out of RAM, your hard drive gets hit — and if
it's old and slow, you're going to feel it.
While solid-state drives (SSDs) have definitely addressed the speed
issue, they're expensive compared to mechanical hard drives and are much
lower in capacity. If you can only afford a mechanical hard drive, make
sure to get one that's at least 7200rpm. As a basic rule of thumb,
larger capacity drives at the same revolutions per minute are faster
than smaller capacity drives.
Graphics
If you're finding games are a bit slow on your desktop, it may be time
to update your graphics card. These days, a new graphics card will have
significantly more effect on your gaming experience than an updated CPU
will.
External, upgradeable graphics on the laptop never really took off —
but perhaps we'll see something emerge should Intel's Thunderbolt
interface take off.
Wireless
If you're finding the wireless in your laptop slow and unreliable, it's
actually quite easy to swap in a new wireless card in your laptop — it
uses a standard interface called Mini PCI Express. Just be aware of a
gotcha: some vendors like HP will only allow certain wireless cards to
be used in their laptops for warranty and support issues. Others, like
Dell, will accept pretty much anything. If you've got a laptop that
doesn't like alternative wireless cards, you can always get a
high-end USB wireless adapter that should improve performance greatly.
If you've got a friendly laptop, it's a simple case (which, depending
on the laptop, may involve removing layers of equipment, admittedly) of
disconnecting the antenna wire, removing the old card, putting in the
new one, reattaching the wire and then installing appropriate drivers.
The hard bit is finding someone that will sell you a
decent chip.
Also consider the age of your router — wireless technology is
improving all the time, and the more expensive routers generally do
provide superior wireless performance. Just remember there's no such
thing as a good router brand — stick to models that have had a good
response in reviews and online.
Last ditch options
Reinstall Windows
Is everything still running slow? It might be time to back up all your
files, format your hard drive and then reinstall Windows from scratch.
While modern operating systems reduce the frequency in which this is
needed, sometimes it's just the only sane way to return things back to
how snappy they once were. Plan out at least a day, triple check
everything is backed up and that you have some way of getting online in
case things go wrong — then dive in.
If you've got a desktop, you'll need your original Windows
installation disc. If you've got a laptop, though, you very likely have a
recovery partition — somewhere on your hard drive where your
manufacturer stores the original state that your laptop arrived in.
Usually you can access this by loading Windows' built-in recovery
environment, often launched by holding (or in most cases, repeatedly
hammering) the proper key from boot. While it can change from laptop to
laptop, here's a "rule of thumb" chart for what needs to be done on a
brand-by-brand basis to get into the recovery environment.
