Speed Up Your Laptop and Keep Up

Technology advances at a very alarming rate. The latest gadget is barely out of the woodwork when the latest toy is already planned and developed. Within a year or two of release, the newest thing out there becomes the oldest thing out there and it becomes obsolete and needs to be replaced. If you want to be technologically competent you need to be versed in the most efficient tools. Within a span of 3 years, a laptop is considered dead, but it should still be functional. If you're pretty attached to it or if you think it's functional enough for you, all you need is to maintain its capacity for performance.

You don't really have to upgrade and get something new when you think that your computer is slowing down, sometimes all you need to do is to keep it clean. So if you think that your programs are running a little to slow for your own taste, you can do the following tips to increase your laptop speed. A lot of people think that because their pc is slowing down, it's because their hardware is old. The truth is that as time goes by, and without proper maintenance, your laptop naturally bogs down and becomes fragmented because of the many programs that it runs.

Fragmentation makes it hard for the laptop, or any pc for that matter to function since it has to search for those files and reconstruct it. This slows down the efficiency of the machine. If ordinary people need to go on a vacation to relax and recharge their systems, laptop computers need to defragment and come back with a clean slate. Before you start cleaning up however, you have to remember to back-up your files; burn them onto DVDs or put them into an external hard drive. After you do this, you'll find that your programs run faster and it'll have a smoother overall feel to it.

If you don't want to go through all that trouble when everything gums up, then you can try disk clean up software. There's free stuff online that you can download to free up disk space by deleting useless files that take up the otherwise free memory on your C drive that probably runs all your programs. You can probably do this by yourself since what the program does is delete temporary internet files, empty the recycle bin, delete cookies and other unimportant files. Using software only makes cleaning up convenient and it's suggested for people who don't know their way around the computer.

You don't really need a new laptop if your old one suits you just fine. Keep up with occasional maintenance and it will still seem like the latest thing off the rack...almost. Keeping track of the fragmented sectors and cleaning it up will improve laptop performance a lot. So think of these things before doing anything rash.

The author of this article Jego Goldstein is a Computer Analyst who has been testing and developing software for several years. He advocates the need for computer literacy in society and strives to make technology more user friendly. Check out his blog.