Nothing frustrates users more than a sluggish system. To get things moving along, first check the obvious stuff, like what’s running at start-up.
Pare down the list of programs to the essentials that you need to launch.
Then make sure users are rebooting regularly (it’s amazing how many users will just run their machine nonstop for weeks). You can also try these five simple tips to get things moving faster:
- Defragment: Yes, it’s an obvious task, but it’s surprising how many admins neglect it. The built in Windows defrag tool will do. Set it up to run regularly.
- Clean up the disk: To run well, a disk needs about 10% of its space free. There are lots of disk cleaners, but you’ll likely need to also manually purge old video, music and picture files as well as apps that are no longer used.
- Clean up the registry: This needs to be done carefully and only after a careful backup. There are a number of applications that will handle this chore. CCleaner is a good one. Run it a couple of times. One pass usually won’t do.
- Remove spyware/malware: You can get a free version of Malwarebytes to take care of it.
- Check for disk errors: To do this, issue a command and reboot your machine. Use: chkdsk X:/f /r (where X is the drive letter you want to check). The “f“ switch tells the command to automatically fix errors and the “r“ switch locates bad sectors and then recovers readable data.