Tips to get a faster PC *Windows 7* edition OS.

[Crabber85]

I've got a laptop that runs Windows 7 Home Premium 32bit, it has 2GB DDR2 RAM, 250GB HDD(Hard Drive), Intel Celeron 900 processor @ 2.20GHz.This laptop was purchased back in 2009 so its got some age on it and has had its fair share of issues and was recently destined for the Recycling center until I got my hands on it and saved it.This PC has an older hard drive that uses the SATA(Serial ATA) connection standard but has a particularly slow data transfer rate which is only 5400 RPM.To put that into context most if not all of the laptops and desktops today use Solid State Drives or SSD's instead of Hard Disk Drives HDD's and these smaller more compact SSD's which can carry the same or more storage capacity of the older HDD tech have insane write speeds like 7000 RPM's plus, with some of the off the shelf consumer grade PC's utilizing SSD's with write speeds of 9000 RPM you can start to see how outdated and obsolete my laptop has become in the last five years alone.Being that my laptop has such a slow write speed its inherently going to be pretty slow when booting or starting it up and when writing or downloading anything to the hard drive but there are things you can do if you have an older PC like me and these tweaks are pretty universal across all versions of Windows7.My Laptop used to have a boot time of three minutes which was super slow and had the diagnostics monitor generating boot error reports every time the computer was booted up because of the slow boot time response.I recently discovered some system tweaks that can be used to significantly reduce the boot time as in my case I was able to reduce my computers boot time from three minutes to a mere forty-four seconds which is pretty impressive by any standards.I could theoretically further reduce this boot time to around thirty seconds if I disabled the last two start-up processes that I have left which are my antivirus and anti-exploit auto runs which were kept on because these two programs need to start up when Windows boots up to protect the computer from boot time infections which happens to be a very very common way for certain nastier infections like Cryptolocker which encrypts all of your files and holds them hostage until you pay for the decryption key, other infections like Boot-kits utilize the master boot record during the system boot up process to change that master record to either lock you out of the boot process which makes the system worse than useless because it simply wont even turn on after the master record has been altered and some infections use this boot time to override your active anti-virus providing the opportunity for the virus to just turn the anti-virus program off before it has a chance to start-up.This is why the better anti-virus programs have a built in boot time scan feature which allows them to run before the system actually boots up and without their auto-run entries they cant do this so for that reason I have left mine on and sacrificed a few seconds of boot time speed for securities sake.The first thing your going to want to do is go to your program manager and uninstall any programs your not using and are sure you don't need if your not sure then just err on the side of caution and safety and leave it.There are a lot of programs that get installed onto our machines before we ever get them, they go through a process at the factory just after the OS is installed where a lot of unwanted and unnecessary programs like the Ask toolbar and Helper software gets installed or bundled in with the OS this only serves to make the computer slower and in most cases less secure but the manufacturer installs this bloatware because they are being paid a huge chunk of money by the vendors of this junk to pre-install their junkware because they the vendor knows that this is the only way to spread their wares and its technically illegal because we the consumer did not ask for this stuff and never consented to it being installed in the first place.Take Lenovo a huge PC manufacturer they just got busted for pre-installing a sneaky little piece of malware that put all of their users security at risk because it auto bypassed the SSL certificate requirements and allowed the use of a very low level security certificate instead when accessing financial websites this makes for an easy time for hackers who are actively watching these web pages because they don't have to do anything to force a downgrade in the security certificate being used so that they can sniff the traffic coming from your PC and steal the now un-encrypted data because its already been done for them by the Super Fish app that Lenovo so lovingly added to their PC's.Lenovo just recently issued a security advisory telling all effected users to disable the app until they can patch the SSL certificate vulnerability.After you have uninstalled any software you don't need you can move onto step two.In this step we will go to the control panel and in the search box type the word tool and you should see a list of results come up on the left hand side of the screen, look for the option Performance Information and Tools click that, another list of options will appear on the left hand side of the page look for the option Adjust visual settings if it shows a yellow shield click on that and run the tool as an administrator, a small window will pop up and under the Visual Effects look on the list of options at the top and click on Adjust for best performance then click on apply and ok.Before exiting the tab scroll down the list and find the option to show thumbnails instead of icons your going to want this option enabled because it will allow you continue to see your thumbnail previews otherwise there wont be any available, exit out of the tab and go back to the desktop.The next step is to turn off the Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service "WMPNETWK", this service uses lot of CPU and RAM and constantly runs even when its not supposed to and is not necessary unless you have multiple computers on the same home network sharing videos with each other via the Windows Media Player sharing service.To permanently stop and disable this resource hog you need click on the windows start button and then type services.msc into the search bar one result should be displayed at the top of the page called Services click on that and a new window should open, your now going to want to scroll down the list provided in the new window and look for the entry Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service right click on it and go to properties then look for start up type and select disabled.This will stop the service from ever running again or getting restarted the next time you boot back into windows.The last step is download CCLEANER from Piriform.com this is the vendors website, download the program and then start it up, go to the tools section and click on start up, your going to want to look at the Windows tab which should be the first one on the left hand side go down the list and look for start up entries your only want to keep your anti-virus software and firewall entries enabled, if you only have auto updaters left you can just leave them disabled as they will only serve to slow your boot up down by a factor of several seconds.As an addition to all the other listed steps your going to want to make sure your only running one anti-virus, one anti-malware and one firewall.You can run an anti-virus like Avast alongside a secondary on demand scanner like Malwarebytes Anti-malware free with no problems as they don't interfere with each other.If your using Norton or McAfee you need to uninstall them completely using a specialized uninstall tool meant for them to ensure a complete and clean uninstall.These two av programs are among the worst of the worst for active detections and zero day prevention and are huge resource hogs.There are definitely better free alternatives out there.You can verify that you have no a

ctive viruses or malware on your system which will slow the system way down because they typically use up all of the available CPU and RAM, got to WWW.ESET.COM and run the free scan from there it will detect any hidden viruses, trojans, worms or other malware that a lot of popular antivirus programs tend to miss and will attempt to clean these infections.Once you have followed the above guide and verified that your machine is malware free you can then attribute and lag in your boot time to the physical hardware limitations of your built in HDD, RAM and CPU.You could improve upon your hardware by upgrading the HDD and RAM but that is typically a very costly move.If you use this guide or any portion of it you do so at your own risk as the information contained herein is provided on an as is basis with no implied guarantee or liability on my part.

[Jackolope]

Jeez, 2GB RAM and 2.20GHz of processor. No wonder it's slow! My 8 going on 9 year old Mac would do circles around that! Most older computers ca no longer keep up with the WiFi signals they get and I found that was slowing down my PC, which I am currently typing on. My PC is a 2004 (totally serious) Windows PC upgraded from XP to 7 64 bit Home. I upgraded my RAM from 512MB (I know, the horror) to 4GB and it goes pretty fast. Could use a new graphics card but I would rather buy a new one at this point. It's a tower by the way not a laptop. I found that after working on many computers and OS over the years that when purchasing a new computer you really do get what you pay for. If you are buying an Acer from Walmart for $100+ then be prepared to get crap.

All companies nowadays have bloatware on the computers. I spent all day once just trying to figure out how to remove WildTangent Games from a Windows 8 laptop at my office.

I use Avast! but recently they too started putting adware on their upgrades without telling people (beware of SafePrice, it will sneak on your computer without your knowledge or consent, turn you Avast updates to manual). So nothing is sacred anymore. Even Microsoft infected it's users with an update that installed GWX.exe on the computer that constantly ran in the background insisting you upgrade to Windows 10. Not a third party, but the actual company and people were furious! I'm at the point in my life were I would be okay if we never had to use computers again.

[Crabber85]

I've been there and already removed the necessary files to do away with the GWX.exe that was installed on my machine as part of an automatically downloaded and installed critical update and it took me several hours to find all the associated files so that they could be deleted so I can completely see why so many users were upset over this covert install of MS produced nagware.

This laptop is very slow so I wouldn't doubt that your Mac could outperform it easily.

I've already gone and done the pricing on upgraded RAM and a bigger hard drive and to do what I want is going to cost me more than the computer is currently worth and with its limitations on what I can do with it as far as upgrading it goes it's just not feasible anymore so I plan to eventually get myself a nice desktop with a 2TB HDD, 16GB of ram, Nvidia graphics card, Intel i7- 990X 3.4GHZ 6 Core processor and a 22 inch monitor, this desktop will be for business and gaming purposes.

[Jackolope]

2TB HDD, 16GB of ram, Nvidia graphics card, Intel i7- 990X 3.4GHZ 6 Core processor and a 22 inch monitor, this desktop will be for business and gaming purposes.

That's a nice setup! It will soar! Should be great for gaming. Believe it or not my computer from 2004 was a gaming computer at the time. Look how far we've come LOL