How to speed up a slow laptop

Are you fed up and frustrated with your slow laptop? Having a laptop which runs quickly is without a doubt far more pleasing.

Even though they might boast hardware specifications on-par with most desktop computers, laptop computers often leave something to be desired when it comes to performance. Knowing this, many developers release so-called PC optimisation software that makes spurious and exaggerated claims such as being able to improve speed and reliability with a single click. However, the only real ways to boost performance either involve investing on upgrades or carrying out some tweaks yourself.

Consider the following options for boosting your laptop:

Buy a Solid State Drive

Most laptops feature mechanical hard drives consisting of spinning magnetic platters. These platters have a significantly slower spin speed than their desktop counterparts in order to reduce power consumption and heat generation. However, a solid state drive contains no moving parts, so there are fewer components to get damaged, generate heat or consume power. Best of all, however, they are orders of magnitude faster to the extent that you can expect to cut booting times to less than a quarter of what they were before. Samsung SSD’s are a very good choice to opt for.

Add More RAM Memory

Aside from being able to replace the hard disk, increasing the amount of RAM memory is usually the only other upgrade option available with a laptop. Since memory sticks are cheaper than ever before, it often makes sense to maximize your laptop’s memory, particularly if it only has four gigabytes or less. If you use your laptop for playing games, intensive multitasking or any high-end productivity applications, upgrading from four to eight gigabytes can make a significant difference. If you can afford it, upgrading to 16 gigabytes won’t do any harm either.

Clean Its Internals

If you’ve had your laptop for a while, there will no doubt be a significant build-up of dust inside the machine, clogging the exhausts and ventilators and perhaps even preventing the fans from spinning properly. Since dust acts as an insulator, it can quickly cause your computer to heat up to dangerously high temperatures to such an extent that the processor and other hardware throttle back performance. Ideally, you should thoroughly clean the inside of your laptop using cans of compressed air, although this will require dismantling it in order to be able to access everything.

Eliminate Bloatware

Bloatware refers to unwanted software installed by manufacturers to earn a commission from the software developers. It may include trial software such as the infamous McAfee or Norton cybersecurity suites or even adware such as Superfish or various other utilities that have no legitimate purpose. If your laptop is fresh off the shelf, then it’s a safe bet that it’s full of bloatware bogging down the system and running every time you start the computer up. To solve the problem, you can either uninstall the software manually or use a tool like the aptly named PC Decrapifier.

Upgrade Your Operating System

One of the most effective ways to give an old laptop a new lease of life is to install the most recent edition of your preferred operating system. New versions tend to address a multitude of issues and improve performance, reliability and features in the process.

Final Words

You generally don’t need to download any third-party software to boost your laptop’s performance, since some manual tweaking and physical maintenance and upgrades will make all the difference. By making the above changes, you’ll have a much more future-proof and smoother-running machine.