Prevent programs from automatically running at startup

Many programmers have learned a trick that gives the illusion of improving the speed of starting their own program, but it comes at the cost of slowing down the overall performance of your PC. This trick consists of loading a portion of the program during the time when your PC is first starting up. Later, when you want to actually run their program part of it is already loaded into your PC's memory and it gives the appearance of loading very quickly.

Another programmer trick is to keep a portion of their program running all the time so that they can periodically remind you that an updated version of their program is available for download. While there are both advantages and disadvantages to this practice the bottom line is that if you do not have a high performance computer the additional load these programs add will eventually cause your PC to run slower over time.

This video shows you how to identify those programs and disable the ones you do not want to load at startup.

Uninstall unused programs

If you have a number of programs installed that you no longer need you can remove them. This will save you disk storage space and will stop these programs from being included in future defragmentation, anti-virus scanning and indexing functions.

Hardware testing

Most slow PCs do not run slow because of a hardware failure. In this video we'll take a look at a couple of tests that can confirm your hardware is ok. If you PC passes these two tests then you should have a high degree of confidence that your slow performance problems are much more likely to be related to software.

Getting started

Speed up your s-l-o-w PC is a series of videos that focus on things you can do to restore your PC to like-new performance. In this introduction video I give an overview of the series.