Speed up Your Windows PC with UPCleaner

Is your PC moving at a snail’s pace? You could upgrade your machine with a solid state drive (SSD), but there are cheaper and easier methods for speeding up your Windows PC. More often than not, installing (or uninstalling) software updates and deep cleaning your hard drive is all you need to make your PC run more efficiently. When things start running slow, it normally means your computer is cluttered, and that’s a much easier fix than an internal-hardware problem (that’s another post for another day).

1. Update Your Software

Ensuring that your computer’s software is up to date is one of the easiest things you can do to increase the speed at which your PC operates.

You can check for software updates in Windows (Take Windows 7 as an example) by clicking on the following: “Control Panel -> System and Security -> Check for Updates.” Follow the onscreen steps to install the updates.

2. Clean Out Your Files

Whether you know it or not, computers have a bad habit of getting overrun with unnecessary files that hog valuable space and bog down your PC. Take some time to go through your files and get rid of any outdated files; you don’t need entire application suites you no longer use. Deleting software you don’t use can also free up some memory on your hard drive as can deleting temporary Internet files and trial apps.

You can delete any unwanted apps in Windows by navigating to “Control Panel -> Programs -> Uninstall Program.” To delete unwanted files, all you have to do is Right Click -> Delete or drag the document to your Recycle Bin. Backing up any documents, music, or pictures you have to the cloud storage server of your choice will help speed things up too.

3. Defragment Your Hard Drive

Saving and deleting files causes your data to be tossed across your hard drive in bits like the crumbs a toddler trails across the living room floor during an afternoon snack. So when your hard drive goes looking for something, it might have to search multiple locations, thereby slowing your PC down. Defragmenting your hard drive cleans up the mess and organizes it, making it easier for your computer to find something when it looks for it.

Defragmenting is incredibly easy to do, but you can take notes if you really want to:

If you’re running Windows Vista or later, your hard drive automatically defragments itself. On Windows, if you want to check when defragmenting is happening and change up when it’s scheduled to happen, just click “Control Panel -> System and Security -> Administrative Tools.” This is where you’ll find the option manually defragment your hard drive. The process will take anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of hours when you defragement manually. It just depends on how bogged down your PC is.

4. Optimize Your PC with Native and Third-Party Software

Third-party software can do wonders for your PC’s speed. One of the free computer optimizer listed below comes highly recommended for cleaning up browser histories, deleting unnecessary files, unburdening your system, and improving overall speed.

UPCleaner – the Ultimate PC Cleaner is, in simplest terms, a multi-functional cleanup tool as the best computer cleaner. If your PC is struggling and clearly coughing up errors and working intermittently, UPCleaner can bring it back.

After installing, you can click the second icon on the main interface and let UPCleaner automatically scan junk files for you. Then, select the item that you want to clean and click the button to finish it in a few seconds.