How I Made My Dell Computer Go Faster

Windows System Maintenance

I have a Dell Inspiron 530 Computer, which I have had for several years – probably about 5 years. Over the last few months the computer has got slower and slower. It would often take up to 20 – 30 minutes from turning it on to being able to get onto the internet, but even then, it was really slow to navigate pages and really slow to open up and use any applications.

I decided to do a little research to see if I could improve the performance.

First up I defragged the disk, but this made little difference.

I also ran Disk Cleanup, but again this made little difference.

When I bought the PC, it was shipped with McAfee virus protection installed and somebody told me that this can really slow down the machine, so with nothing to lose, I found an uninstall tool for McAfee on the internet here http://download.mcafee.com/products/lice… – this totally wiped out the McAfee virus protection software from the computer.

If a component of McAfee isn’t removed, you can use this link http://tools.mcafeehelp.com/doc.php?site…

Just to be on the safe side I installed some free virus protection – Spybot Search & Destory http://www.safer-networking.org/index2.html  and Adaware http://www.lavasoft.com/ so that the computer does have some protection.

Personally, I only use this computer as secondary computer, so do not keep sensitive information like bank details etc on it anyway.

I also went into the Control Panel / System and Maintenance / Windows Update and changed the schedule tasks to “Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them”. This had been set to “Install updates automatically”

My main internet browser had been Internet Explorer and I downloaded Google Chrome and set this to my default browser. For browsing the internet, Google Chrome makes an amazing difference in speed.

So with these changes made, I re-booted up the computer and can now log onto the internet from start-up in approximately 3 minutes – a massive 17 – 27 minutes improvement.

I will continue to monitor the performance of the PC and report any updates – subscribe to my blog on the right of the page to get the latest news.

Update 24/09/12

Well my Dell computer really slowed up again, and after doing some research, I found that the computer was set up to automatically check and install updates.

This was really annoying – just when you were in the middle of doing some work, the computer more or less would stop working and you could hear the hard drive grinding away.

So here are some instructions to show you how you can change the windows settings so that updates are only installed when you want them to be.

Go to control panel

Under the security heading, click on “Check for updates”

Control panel console

Then click on “Change settings”

Install updates options

Select “Check for updates, but let me choose whether to download them and install them” and then click “Save”

Select the option to install updates only when given permission

This will stop the computer from installing the updates whenever it chooses to, which will really slow up your machine.