Software for speeding up slow pc?

[mankymummymoo]

Anyone have any recommendations of (free preferably) software to speed my PC up? It was a high spec desktop when I bought it but that was 7 years ago !

Thank you !

by the way have tried ad aware / AVG etc. to look for nasties...

Try www.ccleaner.com - that will tidy up unused files. May not make any difference speed wise though.

7 years is a long time in computing terms. I seem to replace my machines ever 3 or so years.

There probably isn't much you can do short of upgrading to a new model. If you were able to reinstall the operating system from scratch that would probably help a lot, but if it's pre-XP you couldn't then get windows updates etc for it which would not be good.

You could try defragmenting the drive. Depending on the operating system that can take a long time (overnight) but on older systems that 'might' make a difference.

You can look at what applications run all the time. If you have lots of extra toolbars and addons running they can slow things down a lot.

Beware of adverts for freeware to speed it up. Some of them will make it worse.

My desktop is a 6/7 year old antique and extremely slow, I tried defragmenting and cleanup with little effect.

I added 1GB of RAM to replace the 256MB (I know, don't laugh) it originally had and it has helped a lot, tons faster now and a simple job, and I am very low tech indeed.

If extra memory, defragmenting and cutting down the amount of crap loaded at startup don't help. then consider ditching Windows as your main operating system.

My mother's old PC really struggles with windows. With Vector Linux Light it's a nice responsive machine.

If you don't like OpenOffice, you can still run older versions of MS Office using the WINE package (Office 2000 definitely runs, I imagine Office 2003 would be OK as well).

sobs... my beloved PC is soon to follow that great old scrapyard in the sky...

Have tried most of what everyone suggests, thanks for replying though.

I have 512mb of RAM which considering what Im running probably isnt sufficient. May look into putting some more in...

Now finding out WHERE and WHAT i need to buy, let alone putting it in will be a bit of a challenge...

Go to Kingston Technology and try their memory finder. It's right there on the front page.