It has come to my attention recently that the website hasn't been updated. Well, I thought I had, but unfortunately there was a....hmmm...disconnect between my 9 year old laptop and the world wide web. Yes, I said 9 years old. It was a very sad situation. My computer took forever to shut down, and not the OH MY GOSH ITS FOREVER, 2 minutes kind of forever. It literally took a day and a half to shut down and restart. Every time I typed a letter, there was a 5 second delay before it showed up on the screen. It was unreliable and crashes were common to the point of almost being predictable. So was I surprised when this happened? No, just no.
Thankfully, I served with some amazing computer guys that also became some amazing friends. But one of the complaints that I heard most often from them is "Everyone wants me to fix their computer!" I really, really tried not to abuse that friendship perk. So when I called one of them and immediately started apologizing, he knew I was desperate. And I just had one little question. My question was "Is it even worth trying to fix?" The technology is almost a decade old, but the computer still,-theoretically,-worked for what I needed it for. The laptop is for word processing, email, and internet surfing. I'm not playing games, editing videos, or photoshopping, so my friend said give it a try. Honestly I was ready to throw it through my window but I don't have the hundreds of dollars laying around to replace it, and I didn't want to fix a window.
One of the first things we found was that I was running three different antivirus programs all in real time. That meant they were each sucking up a lot of RAM and they were also causing conflicts with each other. So I deleted one and turned another off of real time scanning. It is still there but now it only runs when I open the program and tell it to. If you are in need of a free antivirus program, I recommend Ad-Aware Antivirus or as a backup AVG Antivirus. Kaspersky is one of the best antivirus programs out right now, but they are proud of their product and you will pay for it.
The second thing that he had me do was download a program from AVG. It is called AVG PC TuneUp 2014. It is free to download and you have a 15 day trial period. If you have major issues like I did, this is the fastest one stop shop for cleaning up a computer. From this program, I was able to fix over 400 registry issues, perform 43 OS updates, delete 37 broken file paths, fix over 250 OS issues, and address 5 internet issues (like thinking you are connected when you aren't). From here, I was also able to address the two dozen or so programs that were running at every start up. Using a handy dandy feature called AVG Duplicate Finder, I found that I had saved a bunch of pictures twice and cleaned up an extra 80 MB of hard drive space. One nice little add on with PC TuneUp is AVG 1-Click Maintenance. It still functions after PC TuneUp ends its trial period. It is annoying to deal with the ad that pops up but it is free, so I deal with it because I use it about once a week.
The third thing is to follow up with an additional registry cleaner and hard drive cleaner. I am a believer in the idea of "Do one thing and do it well". Sure, the TuneUp works well and is great at multitasking and saving time. But I still downloaded a program by Piriform called CCleaner. Once again, its free! It cleans up junk files from programs and uninstalls extra programs from the hard drive. I had an additional 36 issues that needed to be fixed. It has another registry cleaner that found 300+ issues. Next I downloaded WinASO Registry Optimizer for free and found another 275+ registry errors. Since the free trial version only fixes 10 errors at a time, it did take about an hour to clean up all the additional errors. But it was free!
Finally, things needed to be organized. After messing with my registry so much, it needed to be defraged. This tool was located in WinASo. I saw a 23% size reduction and a 30% speed improvement. I had also uninstalled several programs, downloaded a ton of updates, and deleted a lot of files. My hard drive got defraged too.
All in all, I feel like I have a new computer. I am so thrilled and I hope these suggestions help you out too.
DISCLAIMER: My results may or may not be typical. You probably will NOT see the same drastic improvement that I did because, let's face it, anything was better than what I had to begin with.
Thankfully, I served with some amazing computer guys that also became some amazing friends. But one of the complaints that I heard most often from them is "Everyone wants me to fix their computer!" I really, really tried not to abuse that friendship perk. So when I called one of them and immediately started apologizing, he knew I was desperate. And I just had one little question. My question was "Is it even worth trying to fix?" The technology is almost a decade old, but the computer still,-theoretically,-worked for what I needed it for. The laptop is for word processing, email, and internet surfing. I'm not playing games, editing videos, or photoshopping, so my friend said give it a try. Honestly I was ready to throw it through my window but I don't have the hundreds of dollars laying around to replace it, and I didn't want to fix a window.
One of the first things we found was that I was running three different antivirus programs all in real time. That meant they were each sucking up a lot of RAM and they were also causing conflicts with each other. So I deleted one and turned another off of real time scanning. It is still there but now it only runs when I open the program and tell it to. If you are in need of a free antivirus program, I recommend Ad-Aware Antivirus or as a backup AVG Antivirus. Kaspersky is one of the best antivirus programs out right now, but they are proud of their product and you will pay for it.
The second thing that he had me do was download a program from AVG. It is called AVG PC TuneUp 2014. It is free to download and you have a 15 day trial period. If you have major issues like I did, this is the fastest one stop shop for cleaning up a computer. From this program, I was able to fix over 400 registry issues, perform 43 OS updates, delete 37 broken file paths, fix over 250 OS issues, and address 5 internet issues (like thinking you are connected when you aren't). From here, I was also able to address the two dozen or so programs that were running at every start up. Using a handy dandy feature called AVG Duplicate Finder, I found that I had saved a bunch of pictures twice and cleaned up an extra 80 MB of hard drive space. One nice little add on with PC TuneUp is AVG 1-Click Maintenance. It still functions after PC TuneUp ends its trial period. It is annoying to deal with the ad that pops up but it is free, so I deal with it because I use it about once a week.
The third thing is to follow up with an additional registry cleaner and hard drive cleaner. I am a believer in the idea of "Do one thing and do it well". Sure, the TuneUp works well and is great at multitasking and saving time. But I still downloaded a program by Piriform called CCleaner. Once again, its free! It cleans up junk files from programs and uninstalls extra programs from the hard drive. I had an additional 36 issues that needed to be fixed. It has another registry cleaner that found 300+ issues. Next I downloaded WinASO Registry Optimizer for free and found another 275+ registry errors. Since the free trial version only fixes 10 errors at a time, it did take about an hour to clean up all the additional errors. But it was free!
Finally, things needed to be organized. After messing with my registry so much, it needed to be defraged. This tool was located in WinASo. I saw a 23% size reduction and a 30% speed improvement. I had also uninstalled several programs, downloaded a ton of updates, and deleted a lot of files. My hard drive got defraged too.
All in all, I feel like I have a new computer. I am so thrilled and I hope these suggestions help you out too.
DISCLAIMER: My results may or may not be typical. You probably will NOT see the same drastic improvement that I did because, let's face it, anything was better than what I had to begin with.