04-03-2011, 09:09 AM
Hi. I'm VanCliffe, the author of this tutorial and the designer of this thread layout. Enough for me, now lets talk on the subject. This tutorial will help you get past most of the problems you have with your computers. Making your computer faster, is simple and easy. Most of you just don't bother doing that, laziness is the number one factor. Some people just don't bother cleaning their system, they just go to the ultimate and last resort weapon called "Format & Fresh Install". That's the last thing you want to do. If you have no other option, or if your system is so badly infected and is breathing it's last breath then "Format & Fresh Install" would be the great and the wise choice to pick. If you wish to make your system run at top notch speed and performance, even making it a PCish Ferrari then read below.
- Checking & Cleaning the system from Malware
- Removing un-used programs
- Removing un-used start-up programs
- De-fragging
- General Clean-Up
First thing's first, getting rid of any kind of Malware that's present on the system will increase the performance and stability of the system for sure. We are going to do the checking and cleaning of your system with one of the most famous Malware Cleaning software. It's called "Malware Bytes' Anti-Malware". First thing's first, download MBAM from the official link I provided. (Click "here" to download MBAM) After downloading and installing MBAM, please proceed by starting MBAM. A window should appear, something like this:
Select "Perform Full Scan", sit back or get yourself a cup of coffee or tea because this is going to last for a while. It takes approximately about 15-30 minutes, and I recommend you to close all programs that might effect the scanning (Yes, this means Anti-Virus programs as well), like games, graphics editing software and whatnot. The lesser programs, the better performance the scan will have and the shorter it will take to complete. Once the scan is completed, there will be a log file shown in a new notepad document. It will tell you either you have infected files or not. Now head back to MBAM, and if you see "Objects Infected:" marked as red, this means your computer is infected. Just click the button "Remove Selected" but before, be sure to check all of the boxes. With this being done, your PC will be clean from Malware. Now let's proceed to the next step from this wonderful guide.
This step will pretty much just free up space on your hard drive. I've seen in some cases speeding up the computer and actually increasing system performance and stability. Most of the people if not all have programs installed that they don't use daily, or haven't used them in a long period of time. Navigate to "Start -> Control Panel -> Programs and Features", in Windows XP: "Start -> Control Panel -> Add or Remove programs". It should look something like this, if you are in Windows 7:
Now what you should do is look EACH and EVERY installed program carefully, and ask yourself did you install this particular program, and do you need it. If your brain responds with "No" to both of the questions, then hit the "Remove" button. Doing this step will mostly free up free space, but will increase performance a bit as well.
There are programs and applications that don't ask you either you want them to start up as the system starts, but just add themselves as a start-up program anyway. In this part of this wonderful tutorial, we are going to talk about what programs you need to start up with your computer and what not.
Recommended programs:
- Anti-Virus
- Graphics Card Driver/Software
- Sound Card Driver/Software
- Internet Messaging Clients
- Games
- Third-party applications
- Updates
- Game Clients (Ex: Steam)
Cleaning the rest of the garbage that some programs leave when uninstalling is a-must step to do. You may have done this before, but if you haven't we are going to de-frag your whole hard drive. We are going to use Microsoft's Disk Defragmenter, because it's stable and well it's made by MICROSOFT. To start Microsoft's Defragmenter, please navigate to: "Start -> Run -> %windir%\system32\dfrgui.exe". It will show you all of the hard drives that you have, like shown in the photo below:
Now the best show we have is to first Analyze one partition at a time. After analyzing one partition, if it shows a percentage of fragmentation (Ex: "(10% fragmented)") just hit the "Defragment disk" button, sit back and wait. Do these 2 steps for all of the partitions and drives you have in your computer, and once everything is done just simply "Restart" your machine and after starting back up I promise that things will work smoothly.
This is the last step you we are going to do, just keeping sure that we delete the things that can slow our computer.
We are going to delete the following things:
- Temporary Files
- Temporary Internet Files
- History
- Cookies
- Memory Dumps
- Jump Lists
- Clipboard
- Recycle Bin
- Internet Explorer
- SELECT ALL OF THE OPTIONS
Windows Explorer
- SELECT ALL OF THE OPTIONS
System
- Empty Recycle Bin
- Temporary Files
- Clipboard
- Memory Dumps
- Chkdsk File Fragments
- Windows LOG Files
Advanced
- Old Prefetch Data
That was all of the tutorial.
If you have any questions
regarding the tutorial
then don't hesitate
to Private Message me.
Have a nice day!