SPEED UP WINDOWS 10
Give Windows a shot in the arm by cleaning up and optimising your PC with Nick Peers.
Give Windows a shot in the arm by cleaning up and optimising your PC
Spring isn’t exactly in the air, but since it’s most likely cold and rainy outside, now is the perfect time to take a virtual vacuum to your computer. Each year, it’s the same old story: despite your best intentions, you rapidly lose control of what goes on to your PC, as programs are installed and forgotten, while gigabytes of files — from documents to photos and videos — are copied multiple times to a myriad locations, clogging up your hard drives. The result? A computer that’s slow to start, performs sluggishly and is approaching the limits of your storage capacity.
But let’s say you’ve resolved to clean out your PC, and see whether you can bring it back to those heady days of its youth, when it performed with a noticeable zip. This is where we come in. We’re going to reveal all the tips and tools you need to get your PC properly cleaned up and raring to go. We’ll avoid snake-oil remedies, such as Registry cleaning, to focus on techniques that actually make a difference to your PC’s performance.
We’ve split the feature into four sections, enabling you to take your cleaning as far as you wish. Don’t want to dig too deep? Our light clean focuses on quick and easy ways to clean out space using only those tools provided by Windows itself. Feeling a bit braver? We introduce a couple of tools that go further than Windows does. Then we move on to tackle the problem of duplicate files, helping you preserve just the essentials, and freeing up tens (or hundreds) of gigabytes in the process.
If you’re still not satisfied, we push the boat out even further with our deep clean, revealing how to balance the competing demands of your PC’s resources, strip back unnecessary services and optimise older hard drives so they perform that bit quicker. The end result is a revitalised PC, one that more closely resembles the lean, mean speed machine you bought, ready and better able to face the challenges you’ll throw at it over the next 12 months.