5 Easy Ways To Speed Up Your Laptop Published by Cody Kahl Submitted: 09 April,2005 Does your notebook seem slower than molasses these days? Do you often find yourself coming to the point of heartache and even yelling a few choice words at your machine? If so, then the simple steps listed in this article are for you. In this article we will take a look at some of the easiest things that you can do to automatically speed up your laptop. And as a bonus, all of these tips can be done for free! 1.) Defrag - How can defragging your hard drive speed up your notebook? Maybe by explaining how a defrag works, you will see how important it is. When your hard drive is new and has no data on it, things get stored in blocks easily. When files and/or programs are stored in nice chunks, they can get accessed quickly – This is why your hard drive is blazing fast in the beginning. As time goes on things start to slow down. Files get deleted and this creates empty blocks in the hard drive. New files and programs will get saved to these empty blocks, only they aren’t all together – They are spread out. When files/programs are spread out among different blocks of storage, they get accessed much slower. Defragmenting your hard drive brings related files and programs back into a nice big block. This is achieved because your computer knows which files and programs are related through their address. 2.) Empty Recycle Bin – This one is pretty self explanatory, and may even seem like a non issue. Maybe it is, but there are plenty of people that keep their recycle bins full, all the time. If something is in the recycle bin, you might as well empty it. 3.Erase Temporary Files – The internet as well as your operating system often store temporary files in special folders. These temporary files are just that, temporary, but they often stay on your computer for a number of days or even indefinitely. I don’t recommend going and deleting stuff in folders if you are unsure of what you are doing. Thankfully though, there are many programs out there that will go through and delete unnecessary files for you. You can set many of them up to run periodically, and they will do many of things talked about in this article. You can find many of these programs on freeware download sites. 4.) Spyware & Adware Removal – Both spyware and adware are real computer killers these days. You have probably been bombarded by offers to buy programs that will get rid of all the junk on your computer – The simple answer is you don’t need to get these programs. You can find freeware ones all over that will work great. I like to use two programs simply because sometimes one will find stuff that the other won’t. My favorites are Ad-Aware by Lavasoft and Spybot – Search and Destroy. 5.) Hard Drive Space – Ok, I’ll admit, this one may not be free. If you have deleted everything off of your hard drive that you possibly can and you still have a shortage of space, you are simply going to need a bigger hard drive. If you have less than 500 megabytes still available for storage space, I highly recommend getting a bigger hard drive, as a computer with a filled up hard drive will perform very sluggishly. By periodically doing all of the above you can generally keep your notebook in tip-top shape, and save your yelling for something else :) About the Author Cody Kahl is creator and writer of Toshiba Laptops Guide – A site dedicated to providing only the best toshiba laptop parts information. Cody believes in quality, and this free resource proves it.