How to Make Your Computer Faster and Speed it Up!

Easy to follow instructions on how to easily speed up your computer.

Step 1 Remove the Wallpaper

Removing the wallpaper can help increase start up times, and help programs load faster, especially on older PCs. To do this, right click on your desktop, go to properties, go to wallpaper, and click on none, then click apply.

Comments

[Patrik]

Here's another way to speed up your computer. This probably works best with that brand new Vista laptop you just bought...

1) Find a tall building
2) Climb to the top
3) "Accelerate" your Vista computer...

9.81 meters per second squared, Yeah, Baby!

[acidbass]

best idea i have heard for vista

[smattman22]

That deserves a cookie! *hands cookie*

[Grumpy old man]

 Best Idea for a computer I've ever heard. thanks for such a simple but profound idea.

[amedic2be]

LMAO!!! That's about the truth! TY

[homunkoloss]

LOL but if you do it on the north pole you get even more acceleration :-)

[Ponting1]

Remove the unnecessary start-up programs which are not in use. Format your hard-disk after particular time span. You can also buy the Refurbished Desktop Computers which are available in market at cheap rate and gives better performance compared to the old PC's.

[tugsoy]

We have a "be nice" comment policy. Please be positive and constructive with your comments or risk being banned from our site.

[must invent]

Wallpapers and themes are only "eye candies." It really bogs down your system.

[binglebeebop]

searching the unknown processes (with a search engine) will turn up (most of the time) a site called "processlibrary" by uniblue. gives details about the process

[kucloth]

Most of these programs (more like all...) DO NOT speed up ram, but just rearrange how your data and current work are stored and accessed. In most cases, they will severly hurt your computer's performance!

[kucloth]

The bad thing is, these programs will restart everytime you restart your computer. This is sometimes a selected option when you are installing a program. In any case, go to Start >> Run and type msconfig which will bring up a system menu. BE WARNED, changes you make here can seriously mess up your computer. If you don't know what something is or don't know what it does then LEAVE IT ALONE!!!
From the MSCONFIG menu, click the "STARTUP" tab and then you can select/deselect which programs will automatically load in the background. You might be suprised just howmany programs automatically load and then hog resources everytime you turn on your computer!

[livesteamfan]

I found out my computer will not take any more than 256MB of RAM. Is there any way to bypass this and have run 512MB or more? My computer is so old(Win 95), I tried an upgrade to XP but the OS rejected the ancient hardware and I had to restore it, and this only makes it go about 10% faster.

[Trekky 1700]

You might have to upgrade your motherboard if you want more RAM. It migh be better (and cheaper) to buy a new computer. You can get good computers for less than $200 at computer liquidators suich as factorydirect.ca. They have a 3Ghz, Pentium 4 computer, with 512mb RAM, and a 40GB Hard Drive with Windows XP for 169.99. It's not going to be able to do anything extreme, but it's more than decent with 3Ghz. They have tons of others with prices ranging from $39.99-$599.99. The computers are refurbished though, so they aren't new, and they don't (unless otherwise stated) come with monitors.

Here are the links:

Computers at Factory Direct

The HP Computer

[naasim]

hi, thank you so much for posting this,

[Deltaforce2555]

In all honesty if removing the desktop wallpaper really speeds up your computer, you might want to get a new computer. I'm surprised you didn't mention Defraging or Disk Cleanup. Might also want to mention getting a quality spy ware and anti virus program. If all that fails you might want to consider reformatting or just getting a new pc.

[Yerboogieman]

i agree.

[god_gave_knex_to_you]

defraging doesnt add much speed. with my computer, it makes it slower.

[westfw]

The wallpaper speedup seems to be a memory issue. When I got my daughter's computer, I KNEW it had less memory than it needed (128M?), but I was really shocked at how much faster it got with a simpler background; going from a picture to a pattern moved the computer from unusable to not too bad. Adding 512M of memory eliminated the difference. It makes sense; It pretty much needs that whole picture in memory it can redisplay the background as you move windows around. But still ... I was not impressed.

[Punkguyta]

He also doesn't mention how a computer made in the windows 98 era was made to run fast with 98, not XP, and therefore shouldn't be a problem with such things as removing the wallpaper. Unless your computer is slower than 400mhz, you shouldn't notice the wallpaper slowing the computer down at all. The ram program, I would not reccomend ANYONE using this program unless you're a speed-freak and honestly cannot afford any more ram. It may seem like it's helping your computer, but by having the computer have to re-load program data every time you run the ram program because it clears it out, your computer is processing information twice, and technically, making it slower. You're fairly mis-informed, and you gotta start somewhere. Basically you aren't going to speed your computer up much (20-30% in extreme tweaking situations) from using OS tweaks, and can often lead to instability as the OS obviously doesn't have these tweaks enabled or even existant in the first place, because they don't fully support them. Keeping your computer free of viruses/spyware, and not using programs that use an unnecessary amount of memory or cpu to run. Say you bit torrent, a lot of people use Azerus, which is a Java powered program, and is naturally very resource demanding when not optimized properly, this program could run up to 120MB of your ram and easily steal 40-70 of your cpu cycles running idle, I experience this with MANY java applications/games. Yet, use a handy little program that only takes up 200Kb on your disk, barely uses 5 megs of your ram, and lets my cpu idle at 0-2 cycles with it running in the background downloading massive (2-10 gig files, several at once), because it was optimized to run on microsoft's architecture natively. A good 30-40% of your computer's performance outcome is due in part to your computer using skills/style. If you like to slob on shitloads of searchbars and download "Free" programs that come with shareware, thats fine if it suits your fetish, a lot of people don't care about what goes on their computer, and yet they bitch and bitch and bitch that it's slow. Learn to be a power user. Simply put though, you're really only going to get any performance boosts that are worth being impressed with by buying new computer hardware. Upgrade your ram, change up to a higher speed of memory if your motherboard supports it. If you have an older computer around the P2/P3 era, you can find some decent cpu's for these machines at a decent price. I can get a 1.3ghz p3 chip for my old p2 that sits on my floor in my room unused, yet it only has a 400mhz in it now. If you have an older style 5400rpm (revolutions per minute) hard disk, upgrading to a newer 7200rpm disc will definatly give you a snappier performance boost, genereally having a new hard drive will speed up your computer regardless of the disc's actual speed due to advancements in the chipset that controls the hard drive. Video card is a good thing to upgrade too, if you have onboard video, meaning your monitor connects to a port in the i/o shield (the rectangular area where all your motherboard's ports are), not to an actual card attached to the motherboard. Having onboard video is a scam, it uses up your ram, assinging a set amount of memory as video ram for the onboard video card, making it unavalible to windows as all times. Upgrading to a seperate video card will give you fast speeds due to the often faster gpu and the fact that actual VRAM found on a video card is signifigantly faster than just RAM in any case. No upgrading your sound card probably won't make any difference unless it's really old or really cheap, either way a sound card should be able to process the sound stream without help from the cpu, as cheaper sound cards often don't have built in processors or dsp's. Any sound card over $20 will most likely have onboard processing. Stability&Crashing: If your computer crashes even through reinstalls, that could be due to a faulty or not powerful enough PSU (Power supply) and when a load such as a game occurs on the cpu, graphics card, and everything else related to loading that game, it obviously makes a sag in the voltage system and will cause instability at low enough levels if you don't have a high enough wattage power supply. If you charge lots of things off your usb ports, have one or more large video cards, or 2 or more hard disks, you should look into having something 500 watts and up for a start.

[Derin]

I think when I minimized a program on my ancient laptop,it slowly erased the image row by row to reveal the background _slowly

[Punkguyta]

OHhh did you have one of those oldie laptops that the lcd had motion blur?? I had one of those too.. sigh...the early lcd technology has improved vastly, I gave the damn thing away because it was nauseous looking at it.

[Trekky 1700]

Good point.

[Yerboogieman]

even just adding a fan will cool down the processor thus, making the computer run a little better

[The Porsche Fan]

thanks

[millingabout]

Yes, removing wallpaper can help in almost all cases. As a professional computer expert for over ten years (big deal), I always disabled the pictures for simple single color backgrounds. All of the speed ups revolving around this improvement are a result of minimizing the load on the graphics card. IF you really want a picture on the desktop, re-tune it. Lower the bit depth. Crop it. Do whatever you can do to lower the size of the file and complexity of the image.

[cry_wolf]

Go to control panel, double click on system. Now go to the Advanced tab and click on settings for performance. Bam, practically every option for optimizing performance. You can undo things like window animations, etc. Good stuff.

[leafdude]

Additionally, if you want to get "ambitious", you could add the following shortcut: - right click on a blank part of the desktop - create a shortcut - right click on the shortcut and select "properties" - in the field "target" fill in the following text: %windir%\system32\rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks - click ok This is will clear out idle tasks and recover some page file areas not being used. Double click on this shortcut once in a while and it will make your sluggish WinXp faster. This works only on Windows XP and Vista.

[Trekky 1700]

I didn't even know you could do that, I think I'll try that. I think the comments are becoming more helpful than my instructable, which is cool.

[GorillazMiko]

Some pretty cool stuff. Will definitely like my computer to be faster. I will use some of the methods above and below (in the comments), great job.

[Trekky 1700]

Thanks

[beerboyone]

Another step could be to turn off some of windows "visual effect". control panel->system->Advanced(tab)->settings->visual effects(tab). there is a list of visual effects listed that you can toggle. there is also radio buttons at the top for best appearance or best performance.

[Trekky 1700]

Wow, I didn't even know that was there, thanks.

[PS118]

All great solutions. Good job! I do have one question though... Do those ram balancing apps really buy you anything? It seems to me that by the time you account for the extra program swapping in and out, the cpu ticks required to run it, and the overhead of conteplating ones' navel trying to find "the best" ram balance, there would be little or no net advantage. Can you confirm or refute this? Thanks!

[Trekky 1700]

The RAM programs seem to work for me, I have 2 different ones on 2 different computers and when there on the computer seems to work faster, I'm not sure if it compensates though, for the amount of CPU used by the program. When it's on programs load fast, I can run more software without slowing down.