Give your PC a fresh lease of life with these speed up tips

If you’ve had the same PC for some time you’ll inevitably start to notice it slowing down as files accumulate and the system gets log jammed, making it increasingly difficult to get any useful performance out of the machine.

Fortunately, there are a number of ways in which you can clean your computer up and get it back to its former self, and they’re completely free.

Try a few of these easy tricks to give your PC a fresh lease of life.

• The Disk Defragmenter will optimise your disk space by pulling together all the file sections you actually use and overwriting the ones that are filled with rubbish or are simply empty. Access it via Start>Control Panel>Disk Defragmenter.
• A lot of space is usually taken up by things like photos, videos and music files, so you could try transferring these to an external storage device like a portable hard drive.
• As well as data files, the PC’s registry can get clogged up over time and slow the system down, so use one of the free utilities available on the net to speed it up by getting rid of things like duplicate files.
• Remove old toolbars that you don’t really use anymore via the browser’s add-on settings, as these can significantly slow down your internet browsing speed.
• Use one of the many freeware anti-virus, -adware and –malware products available to remove the numerous malign programs that often infect an older PC in particular, especially if you haven’t run any scans recently.
• Use Task Manager to disable any of the startup programs that prevent your computer from booting up as quickly as it used to.
• Over time, programs accumulate on your PC and you can quickly lose track of which ones you actually use, so deleting the unused ones via the Control Panel should make a big difference if you want to speed up PC performance.