4 of the Biggest Speed Hogs on Your Computer and How to Fix Them

1. Bloatware

Bloatware is far and away one of the biggest issues computer users deal with when it comes to a slow computer. Depending on what type of computer you bought or what operating system you've installed, bloatware can take many shapes, having a profound impact on your computer's speed.

Let's look at a basic example. You might buy a nice photo printer to hook up to your computer. When you install the software to use the printer, it may actually install a whole suite of programs that you never use! Worse still, it can install plugins and unnecessary drivers that take up all sorts of room on your computer — all just so you can use the photo printer.

Going through and deleting all of these unnecessary additives is a great way to unburden your computer. The same goes for any other programs you don't use, such as applications that come stock with your computer or affiliate programs that are installed when you install other software.

Bloatware can quickly become a major problem because it sucks up hard drive space and hogs RAM — especially if it's running in the background on your computer. The quicker you get rid of all the unwanted programs, the quicker your computer will regain its speed!

2. Viruses and malware

Perhaps the easiest computer speed booster is a thorough virus check. Viruses and malware can infect your computer and quickly start to bog things down. They hog processing power and can proliferate quickly on your hard disk, making your computer work harder to sustain them when it might otherwise use its processing power elsewhere.

Most people think of viruses and malware as being a threat to their data security — which is absolutely true — but they forget the huge amount of computing power a virus takes. Scanning for viruses routinely, pinpointing them and removing them will make sure your computer isn't overburdened or working harder than it needs to be.

3. Startup items

Like bloatware, startup items can be a major drain on your computer's speed because of their tendency to hog RAM. Worse still, because they launch on startup, many people fail to realize these items are running and often, don't ever do anything to close them or delete them! As more and more startup items accumulate over time, your computer will only get slower and slower. Your computer can even suffer catastrophic crashes if there are too many startup items, simply because it may not have the RAM to process them all at once!

The simplest way to prevent startup items from piling up on your operating system are to make sure you're not enabling them during program installations. Generally, you can uncheck boxes for startup items or launch processes. Otherwise, you can always manage your startup items collectively through your system preferences. Either way, startup items need to be nixed — all but the essentials.

4. Open programs

Many people tend to forget that the more open programs they have running on their computer, the more it's going to reduce the speed of their operating system. For example, if you have a photo editing program, a word processing program, an internet browser and a music player all going at the same time, your computer needs to process all of them at once! It's no small feat and eventually, your system is going to overwhelmed… but not before slowing down to a crawl. Close what you're not using and be cognizant of how many programs you have running at any given time. Your computer will thank you with higher speed levels.

If you've addressed these big 4 speed hogs and your PC is still crawling along at a snail's pace, it's time to look into programs that speed up your computer. MyCleanPC is the place to start! With a quick scan and some configuration, the secret to speeding up your Windows PC could be in empty caches, cleaning up the registry, deleting temporary files, defragmenting your drive or something else altogether. MyCleanPC will do it all, to return the speed to your computer.