There’s nothing quite as annoying as using a computer that is going slowly. It can feel like you are spending a lot of your time waiting for menus to respond, programs to open, and screens to change when you are working on an older machine that’s not quite as fast or responsive as you would expect a newer one to be. However, the good news is that you might be able to do some things to speed your computer up.

Uninstall Programs

If you want to speed up your PC or laptop, then one good way to do this is to check for any programs that you are unlikely to use again and uninstall them. This will help you ensure that your hard drive isn’t too crowded, and that power isn’t being used up on programs that you don’t need unnecessarily. Ideally, you should make sure that around fifteen percent of the space on a hard disk drive or twenty-five percent of the space on a solid state drive is empty. You can always back up files to the cloud or external storage before deleting them from your computer to help speed it up.

Change the Power Plan

Changing the power plan is another option to consider as a method of speeding up your computer. If you are on a balanced or energy-saving plan, then this might be able to help you save money when it comes to energy use but is not always the best idea for computer performance. To do this on a Windows PC, go to the start menu and search for ‘control panel’. Click on Hardware and Sound, go to Power Options, and select Choose a Power Plan. Switching to ultimate performance or high performance should help your computer run faster.

Switch the Graphics Card

If your computer runs OK, or even well most of the time but starts to stutter and crash whenever you are trying to do more graphically intense tasks like video editing or playing games, then it might be worth considering upgrading your graphics card. While this might not always be possible with a laptop, you can easily upgrade the graphics card on most PCs. Click here for more information on Intel graphics cards.

Quit Syncing

While having everything automatically backed up from your computer to the cloud can be very handy, it’s also worth noting that automatic syncing can cause your computer to perform slowly as data is constantly being uploaded and downloaded from your PC to the cloud, which takes up a lot of power. While there are lots of programs that do this, the good news is that you can usually choose to pause or turn syncing off  easily.

Upgrade Your RAM

A slow computer especially when multi-tasking can be a sign that you don’t have enough RAM. You can usually quite easily replace the sticks that you already have for more RAM. If your device supports dual-channel ram but you are only using single-channel, it’s definitely worth the upgrade. A slow computer can be seriously frustrating, but the good news is that there are several things you can do about it without having to replace the entire machine.