SECRET FREE PC FIXES
So-called ‘Experts’ Want You To Pay For
Learn them now – prevent problems FOR GOOD!
Getting your faulty PC fixed can be a costly undertaking – in more ways than one. Perhaps your first thought is to take it in to your local computer repair shop. Alternatively, you might consider one of any number of programs that promise to sort every problem on your PC with the click of a button - as long as you pay for their premium version, of course.
Worst of all are the scams that surface when you search for a solution to your problem online. These often take the form of sponsored ads pushed to the top of search results to snare the unwary. These ‘services’ – usually extortionate – probably won’t fix your PC woes, but they are quite likely to plant malware. Avoid at all costs!
With a little bit of know-how it’s easier than you think to fix a whole range of Windows problems yourself - all fairly quickly and all for free.
Whether you want to make your programs load more quickly, recover missing hard-drive space, rediscover lost Wi-fi passwords or diagnose slow broadband, many of the tools you’ll need are built into Windows already. Otherwise, a free download or a quick tweak to Windows’ settings will usually do the job.
Over the next few pages, we’ll look at some of the most common PC problems and highlight how tech-support companies and software developers are only too keen to fix them for you (for a fee). Don’t be tempted because we’ll explain precisely how to fix these problem yourself - for free.
We’d also love to hear your experiences of avoiding paying so-called experts and fixing your computer for free. Email us at
Shorten startup times Paid-for option to avoid
There’s a wealth of paid-for software, such as Ashampoo Winoptimiser (£15 from www.snipca.com/30216), which promises to shorten your PC’S boot time and improve its overall performance. While these programs may live up to these claims, they are often essentially just expensive user-friendly interfaces for core Windows tools.
Free fix
Microsoft has already done a lot of the work for you by changing the way Windows 10 boots. Rather than shutting down completely every time you power off, it closes your programs entirely, but merely hibernates the Windows system so it can restart more quickly.
If your PC is compatible with Windows 10 and you’ve been putting off upgrading, this benefit alone might be worth making the move for. Although Microsoft’s Windows 10 upgrade app has long since been withdrawn, some Computeractive readers with old Windows 7, 8 or 8.1 product keys have been able to activate Windows 10. To see if you can, download Windows 10 from Microsoft ( www. snipca.com/30274) and enter the key during installation.
To check how many startup items you have and disable any you don’t need, open Task Manager (Ctrl+ Shift+escape), then click the Start-up tab. If you see any entries you don’t recognise, find out what they are by right-clicking the column title bar and selecting ‘Command line’. On our PC, this revealed a startup item called ‘Program’ to be a video-conversion tool from Wondershare (see screenshot above right) that we thought we’d uninstalled. Right-click those you want to remove from startup and select Disable.
Take particular note of the ‘Start-up impact’ column, which tells you how great an effect each one is having on the time it takes your PC to start. On our PC, Veracrypt isn’t making much of a difference, as its impact is ‘Low’, but Onedrive and Dropbox are both rated as ‘High’, so will be having a far greater effect. It might therefore be worth us using just one cloud service and disabling the other.
Speed up your PC Paid-for option to avoid
Either install more memory or use a memory-optimisation tool like RAM Booster (£14 from www.snipca. com/30226) that manages your existing memory to get the best out of it. One way it does this is to free up memory for programs you’ve just opened.
Free fix
First, check exactly which programs are hogging the most resources. Open Task Manager (Ctrl+shift+escape), click the Processes tab, then the headings on the table of running programs, paying particular attention to CPU, Memory and Disk. As you click each one, the programs consuming the most of each resource will be moved to the top of the list, allowing you to see which are using more than their fair share.
Switching to less resource-hungry programs can help speed up your PC. Chrome is a prime offender. On our computer we had three Chrome windows open with a total of nine tabs, and it was eating into almost 3GB of memory - more than seven times that of the next program. If you find web browsing slows Windows down, try switching to Edge or Firefox.
While you’re at it, download the free Adwcleaner from Malwarebytes ( www. snipca.com/30232) which, as well as detecting adware programs, will remove annoying random advertising, unwanted toolbars and more.
Stop Windows freezing Paid-for option to avoid
Frequent freezes while running Windows can often be down to corrupted or outdated drivers causing the operating system to stall. Drivers can usually be upgraded for free, but you need to identify which ones. Driver Easy Pro ( www.drivereasy.com) detects missing and outdated drivers, updating them for you. However, a one-year licence for up to three PCS costs almost £30.
Free fix
Driver Booster 6 Free ( www.snipca. com/30230) compares your setup against its database of 2.5 million drivers to identify which parts of your system could do with an update. When we ran it on our PC, which we make a point of keeping up to date, it found outdated drivers dating back to 2006 (see screenshot below) - eight years before the PC was even built! Installing the current drivers was a simple case of clicking the Update button beside each one.
Helpfully, Driver Booster creates a