What to do with a computer that is running slow

A Computer running slow can mean a lot of different things, apart from viruses and malaware which I will cover in a later topic, there are 3 main ways to improve the performance of your PC without too much effort.

1. Disk cleanup
Start - All programs- Accessories- System Tools and then disk cleanup
It should look like this:

It will tick automatically what it thinks best to delete, I recommend leaving as is and just press OK, after a few minutes it will finish.

2. Disk Defragmentor
All your files do not add themselves in order on to your hardrive and can be "fragmented" this leads to reduced perfomace as the hardrive tries and accesses the data.

Start- All programs- Accessories - System tools - Defragment

It should look like above:

Once you click on it it will ask you to analyse each drive (if you have more then one) after it analyses the hard drive it will tell you if you need to defragment . Defragment can take quite a long time so make sure you have plenty of time when you want to do it. I quite often do it overnight.
I also recommend you use defragment about once a week maybe once every 2 weeks to keep on top of it.

3. Programs running at start up of the machine

Tweaking what programs run when you first start the machine up can also help to increase the speed a little bit to do this follow the instructions below:
Start - Run - type msconfig, this will open up the system configuration utility. Select the tab that says General and then tick the box next to "Selective Start up".
Then click the Start up tab and it will give you a list of all the programs that start when the machine starts. Obviously don't delete and Windows System applications anything else should be fine.

This is what the system configuration utility looks like