4 ways to clean-up your PC to make it faster

It’s a well known fact the more you use a PC,  the slower it gets.  After years of usage it’s sometimes difficult to remember how fast your PC was before you installed all that freeware and shareware.  There are many ways of cleaning-up your PC,  and there is much you can do manually to speed-up your PC and increase it’s performance. However, doing it manually can take forever, and unless you really know what you’re doing, you’ll run the risk of ruining your PC.  Perhaps the most sought after improvement is to speed up the boot time of your PC, and many of these tools below will indeed help you speed up the boot times and shutdown times.

In this article below, we talk though 4 of the best tools to clean-up your PC, make your PC faster,  and reduce some of the clutter.   By using these tools on a regular basis,  you should manage to keep your PC in tip-top condition.

There are numerous ways in which you can clean-up and speed-up your PC.  Many of these tools below work to improve boot and start-up times, improve shut down and reboot times, remove unwanted programs, optimise disk space, defragment the hard disk to decrease load times,  turn off unneeded start-up programmes, accelerate the opening and closing of document and files, remove defects in the registry and finally, reduce the size of the registry and improve system performance.

The four best tools to help speed up your PC discussed below are:

• Tree Size – for finding large files and more disk space
• TuneUp Utilities 2010 – a comprehensive suite of tools for defragging disks, cleaning the registry and so much more.
• CCleaner – for removing unwanted programs and registry entries
• Ad-Aware Free Anti-Malware – for identifying and remove resource hogging malware.

Tree Size Free

TreeSize Free is freeware for Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7.  It’s only a small download of just 2.35MB, so it’ll take little disk space and system resources.   It will help you quickly identify where all your precious disk space has disappeared to, allowing you to easy identify large files which could possibly be removed.  All you need to do is select the folder you want to scan (if you’re doing a full system clean, you’ll want to select the root folder C:\) and click Scan.  The tool will then work in the background summing up all the file sizes in each folder. Scanning is done as a background process, so you can already see results while TreeSize Free is working.  The simple display below shows an Orange bar for the folders with the largest files,  allowing you to then drill down and find the exact location of the culprit.

Download TreeSize

TuneUp Utilities 2010

This is one of our favourite tools at voato.  It has a relatively small size of just 18.9MB so it won’t take long to download.  There is currently a 30 day evaluation version available. This is a fully working version, with no limitations which should be more than enough for a spring clean to speed-up your PC.  We’ve been using TuneUp Utilities for many years to remove and prevent  unwanted start-up programs which is one of the biggest culprits of slow start-up times. In addition, it’s defrag features are second to none, and by using this tool,  you’ll quickly improve the time it takes to open and save files.

Download TuneUp Utilities 2010

CCleaner

CCleaner is a tool mostly focussed on cleaning up Internet Explorer, your Windows Registry,  and removal of temporary files, memory dumps, and cache data. The effective cleanup of Internet Explorer will undoubtedly improve your browsing experience,  and speed up your interaction with web. At just 3.3MB to download, it’s a small and very effective tool.   CCleaner also excels in the removal of unwanted start up programs, and will also uninstall problematic software which refuses to be uninstalled any other way.  CCleaner also helps you manage and clean up your system restore points which can take up precious disk space.

Download CCleaner

Ad-Aware Free Anti-Malware 8.2

The final area you need to clean-up on your PC and increase it’s speed is to remove spyware and webware which has installed itself on your PC without you knowing.  These can have a massive effect on your PC,  and run quietly in the background using up not only disk space, but memory, CPU, and network bandwidth.  If you’re wondering why your broadband connection has slowed down, chances are you have some spyware installed which is hogging it.

At 93MB to download, it’ll take sometime to come down the wire and install,  but the effects can be worth waiting for. Installation can take a long time indeed.  It provides real-time protection against some of the basic culprits that will slow down your PC : spyware, trojans, rootkits, hijackers and keyloggers. The free version doesn’t contain anti-virus tools,  so you’ll need to ensure your AV software is up-to-date.   The tool simply scans your PC identifying rouge software and helping you remove it and speed up your PC.  The effects on a PC which has used by the family to install anything, can be amazing.

Ad-Aware Free Anti-Malware supports Windows 7 (32 and 64-bit), Windows Vista (32 and 64-bit), Windows XP (32-bit) and Windows 2000 Pro.

Download Ad-Aware Free Anti-Malware