The Wychwood Online Club
In association with Oxfordshire Rural Broadband
In association with Oxfordshire Rural Broadband
Copyright © ORB 2009
Get the answers to those questions you've always wanted to know but never got round to asking
Q
Why does it take such an age to respond, so long that I get bored with waiting.
A
Yes this can be very frustrating! There are a number of things that can cause your computer to run slowly.
Is your computer doing a regular update of the virus checker or Windows? Both these are essential 'housekeeping' tasks but can tie your computer up for a bit. Maybe rescheduling these to a time that's more convenient would be a good idea.
Have you 'house cleaned' your computer recently? As we use our computer day to day it gets cluttered up with deleted files, temporary Internet pages and what is known as fragmented files. All these can slow you up.
A good house cleaning routine is to:
Run 'Disc Cleanup' regularly. This is found under Accessories>System tools from your start menu. Generally you can follow all its recommendations, but unless your hard disc is filling up don't compress your data files. This will slow things up!
Run 'Disc Defragment' once a month. This is also found under System tools but can take an hour or more, so do this when you don't want to use your machine.
Consider removing programs you no longer use. We often add programs 'on spec' and then find they don't do what we want. Use 'Add or Remove programs' from your control panel, also accessed from the Start menu.
When loading programs, don't select to have these loaded at start up unless absolutely necessary. This again will slow you up!
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