Intro­duc­tion

Is your com­puter not as fast as it used to be? Do you con­sis­tently get appli­ca­tion crashes, “time outs” and the dreaded hour­glass? When you press the power but­ton on your com­puter in the morn­ing, can you start the cof­fee, take a shower, style your hair and get dressed, all before your com­puter is fin­ished booting?

If you answered yes to any of these ques­tions, your com­puter needs more than another cup of cof­fee. It needs a tune-​​up. You prob­a­bly already know that there are a myr­iad of ways that a com­puter repair pro­fes­sional can help you. But, unfor­tu­nately, not every­one can afford to call a com­puter repair spe­cial­ist every time some­thing breaks — espe­cially those hard­est hit by the cur­rent eco­nomic downturn.

I’ll be hon­est, here. As a com­puter repair con­sul­tant and owner of a com­puter repair shop in Fort Collins Col­orado, I am not one to sug­gest the use of free tools very often. When some­one can afford to pur­chase soft­ware, I usu­ally advise them to pur­chase a qual­ity retail prod­uct, because the paid-​​for soft­ware is typ­i­cally far supe­rior and the user is enti­tled to support.

In my expe­ri­ence, free tools are usu­ally either crip­pled ver­sions of their related non-​​free prod­ucts, or sim­ply don’t do a good enough job to be use­ful. But, there are a few free tools that are excep­tions to that rule, and offer a good prod­uct for those who gen­uinely can­not afford to pur­chase off-​​the-​​shelf software.

So, with that being said, here are my 5 sug­ges­tions for free tools to speed up your slow com­puter. All 5 of these pop­u­lar tools can be searched for and found eas­ily through Google.

1. CCleaner

CCleaner is leg­endary for its use­ful­ness in help­ing rid com­puter sys­tems of any and all junk that has accu­mu­lated on a hard drive. How­ever, there is a hid­den gem in CCleaner: its abil­ity to find and clean prob­lems in the registry.

Using CCleaner once per week will keep your sys­tem run­ning pretty smoothly all by itself. But, com­bin­ing it with the other tools listed below will give you some syn­er­gis­tic results. For exam­ple, in our com­puter repair shop, we use CCleaner before any antivirus scan because it will help the scan go much faster (the result­ing drive has fewer files to scan).

2. Startup Inspec­tor for Windows

In case you didn’t know, too many pro­grams that load on start-​​up can quickly crip­ple a good com­puter. Lim­it­ing start-​​up pro­grams to only the bare essen­tials is an excel­lent way to reclaim much lost speed. Some peo­ple even go to extremes and dis­able all start-​​up pro­grams and non-​​Microsoft ser­vices, but that can have a neg­a­tive impact on things such as backup sched­ules, antivirus pro­tec­tion, and use­ful key­board short­cut keys.

Startup Inspec­tor for Win­dows takes the guess work out of this process. Not only does this util­ity take the place of MSCONFIG’s very lim­it­ing inter­face for man­ag­ing start-​​up pro­grams, but it also has the abil­ity to access a data­base of known start-​​up pro­grams. It will even give you sug­ges­tions for dis­abling cer­tain appli­ca­tions, or leav­ing them intact so as to not limit the func­tion­al­ity of cer­tain pro­grams.

3. Mal­ware­bytes

Noth­ing chokes a computer’s speed faster than Mal­ware. But, how do you sort the good from the bad? Is that tool­bar you installed a bad pro­gram? How about that game you love to play online? Could that “coupon find­ing” tool­bar that you just installed be a virus in disguise?

That’s where Mal­ware­bytes can help. It’s one of the best free mal­ware removal util­i­ties that I know of. Many sea­soned com­puter repair tech­ni­cians swear by it. Although the free ver­sion of Mal­ware­bytes is “crip­ple­ware” (the free ver­sion doesn’t pro­vide real-​​time pro­tec­tion), it does a very good job if run man­u­ally on a reg­u­lar basis.

4. Avast Antivirus

Avast is a pro­gram that I’ve warmed up to over the years. As I stated ear­lier, I’m picky about that soft­ware I rec­om­mend. That goes dou­ble for antivirus pro­tec­tion, because antivirus pro­tec­tion is usu­ally your only bar­rier between you and the scum­bags of the Inter­net. I will never respect those who would steal and use some­one else’s iden­tity and/​or finan­cial infor­ma­tion to get some­thing for noth­ing, rather than to work hon­estly for what they want.

If you absolutely can­not afford antivirus pro­tec­tion, do not go with­out it. Instead, down­load Avast Home Edi­tion. Avast Home Edi­tion is com­pletely free, but you do have to reg­is­ter it before the 60 day trial has expired. Reg­is­tra­tion is free, and after­ward you can use it for a year before hav­ing to re-​​register. In addi­tion to being free, Avast works pretty well, too.

5. Defrag­gler

With­out get­ting into the tech­ni­cal details of what frag­men­ta­tion is, or how it hap­pens, let’s just say that if you haven’t defrag­mented your hard drive lately, you are prob­a­bly over­due. Defrag­ging your hard drive is like reor­ga­niz­ing your stor­age closet. It makes things eas­ier (and there­fore quicker) to find.

There are very few tools that rival Defrag­gler. Although I tend to pre­fer Diskeeper more than Defrag­gler due to it’s abil­ity to per­form real-​​time defrag­ment­ing, Diskeeper is not free. How­ever, Defrag­gler is a close sec­ond to Diskeeper and is com­pletely free of charge.

Coin­ci­den­tally, Defrag­gler is made by the same com­pany as CCleaner. It seems that Pir­i­form is on a roll when it comes to devel­op­ing and releas­ing free and use­ful util­i­ties. Google the term “defrag­gler”, down­load it, use it. Leave it run­ning overnight, as it will prob­a­bly take sev­eral hours to finish.

The Clean-​​Up Pro­ces — Step by Step

The order you use these free com­puter repair tools are up to you, but as a pro­fes­sional who has done this more times that I can count, here is my rec­om­men­da­tion for how to use these free tools to speed up your slow computer.

Use Startup Inspec­tor for Win­dows to remove unneeded pro­grams from startup Reboot Use CCleaner to clean junk files from the sys­tem Clean the reg­istry with CCleaner Reboot Update Mal­ware­bytes and scan. Remove any­thing it finds. Reboot if it rec­om­mends you to do so. Update Avast and scan. It should quar­an­tine any­thing it finds auto­mat­i­cally. Reboot if needed. Use CCleaner (again) to clean up any junk left over from the virus removal. Yes, clean the reg­istry with CCleaner one more time, also. Defrag the hard drive to reor­ga­nize the remain­ing “good” data on your drive.

Con­clu­sion

In 9 out of 10 cases, using these 5 free util­i­ties will have your com­puter back up to speed. If you prop­erly uti­lize these tools and your com­puter is still not func­tion­ing prop­erly, it doesn’t mean that the tools did not work.

Per­haps your com­puter prob­lem is beyond the scope of these tools. Maybe you don’t have a suf­fi­cient amount of RAM mem­ory. There is also a pos­si­bil­ity that your com­puter has a seri­ous hard­ware issue (such as a fail­ing hard drive) which requires the atten­tion of a com­puter repair professional.

Luck­ily there a hun­dreds of web­sites on the Inter­net that will pro­vide free advice to those in need. They won’t do the work for you for free, but will be glad to pro­vide infor­ma­tion and resources to help you help your­self. There are even a few that offer free video train­ing on how to repair your own com­puter. By doing your home­work and ask­ing a lot of ques­tions, you can learn to solve any com­puter prob­lem with­out spend­ing any money at all.

Good luck.

Related posts:

1. Slow Com­puter? — Learn How to Speed it Up!
2. Slow Com­puter Speed — Fix it in Seconds!
3. Com­puter Repair Tools — PC Repair Tools
4. Com­puter Repair­ing tools that can Help You in Speed­ing up Your PC
5. Tak­ing Your Com­puter Ser­viced For Free With Com­puter Repair Ser­vice Soft­ware Is Easy!