It comes a time when your once rocket boosted PC no longer has the ‘umph’ it once boasted. To do all the things it once did. It’s probably the time you think that a new PC would do you good. Then again, may be not. There seems to be a little problem. You bought the little weasel only four months ago.

Don’t despair I am going to make an attempt to save you a bank full of cash rather than running to the computer store. Over time, as I have been working in lots of places I have had people complaining that their PC’s are extremely slow. True to that I must say. However, the thing that gets to me is that most cases it needs just a little tuning of the system.

Ok what I have found out in most cases is this. People have a tendency of downloading lots of stuff from the Internet that ends up ruining the whole computer system. A lot of these programs downloaded off the Internet is badly written and can cause some serious memory leaks.

With that in mind I think we can now begin with the cleanup.

1. Scandisk utility

I’ll start off by mentioning this utility. Basically what this one does, is that it checks your disk for file system errors, bad sectors etc. If there are errors or damaged disks and the like, it becomes quite difficult for the system to manage and read the storage.

This tool will sort out those issues. This utility can be executed by double-clicking the computer icon, then right clicking the logical drive (drive c:/e: etc). On the dialog that appears, click the “tools” tab then click the “check now” button.

2. Disk defragmenter

This is a utility that makes an attempt to put all the parts of a file in one location. Basically when you open a file like lets say a spreadsheet. The file is most probably stored in smaller bits spread all over the hard disk.

So basically disk defragmenter tries to rearrange the files on the hard disk and put them all into one place. This utility can be found in start => all programs (programs in win2K) => accessories => system tools => disk defragmenter. Note that you may also find the tool at the same location as the scandisk utility.

3. Disk Cleanup Utility

After a few weeks using your PC, it resembles an old antique store- ok let me say a junkyard. Whenever you finish using a file, in lots of cases it ends up lingering on your hard drive thus clogging it.

This utility will help delete unused files and temporary files that may be clogged up on your disk.

To get to this utility go to start => all programs (programs in win2K) => accessories => system tools =>click Disk Cleanup.

4. Memory management software

This is also another way of getting your system to perform much faster. This works by freeing up memory that is being used by programs that where closed a long time ago. It is common to have programs occupy memory long after they where shut down thus causing the system to lack resources.

A cool place to get a good memory management software is www.meikel.com. They have a real cool memory manager called Freemem that really works for us. You may go there download and install it.