How to speed up an old computer and extend its lifetime

- Part 1

I’m sure most people have had to sit in front of an old computer and wait at least 5 minutes before it is fully booted and ready to use. When it’s the end of the month and you have a pile of invoicing to do it’s the last thing you need. This is because the performance of PC’s can decrease significantly with age if they are not maintained and regularly serviced. This used to be a bit of a pain if you weren’t prepared to spend money or a bit of a computer geek. Well not any more! If you have a couple of hours to spare (it could take less, it could take more depending on the current performance of your computer) to download and install a couple of free programs you could significantly improve the performance in a number of areas.

The first of these software programs is Soluto . It has 3 main functions: Slash boot-up time, increase web-browser speed and prevent system crashes. Soluto sppeds up your web-browser by identifying all the add-ons which are running on your web-browser(s) and giving you the option to disable the add-ons you don’t us. Whether this improves the speed of the browser is arguable as the increase in speed only appears to be minimal, but this is not this software’s greatest feature. Where this nifty little program really comes into it’s own is reducing your boot-up time. It allows you to remove programs which have automatically set themselves to run in the background. These aren’t malicious programs, but most of the time you don’t need them to be running when you start up. One of the slight drawbacks of Soluto is that it is unable to remove a lot programs itself, but it does tell you each program in your start up and exactly how much of your boot up time each program is taking.

If you can’t remove a program through Soluto you can always go to your Control Panel and remove it from there. With this software I was able to reduce the boot-up time of an 8 year old laptop down from 6:58s to 1:54s, it took a couple of hours but now I don’t have the inconvenience of having to wait over 5 minutes to use the computer to be ready, and it is less frustrating to use. The second piece if software will be introduced in part 2 of this blog post