If your computer’s getting old and clunky then it might be worth buying a new one but before you do that there are a number of fixes you can perform that are often free or cheap, effortless and not very challenging technically which will get your computer running better.

First of all finding an external hard drive for your PC, whether it’s a desktop pc or laptop, will enable you to clear space from your hard drive which in turn will make your computer run much faster. Another benefit of moving your files so that they’re backed up off of your computer’s main drive is that it is safer there if anything gets stolen. Thieves look for computers along with other audio visual equipment such as TVs and DVD players but they’re unlikely to be interested in a little box with no obvious value or importance. You should also consider storing everything that’s important to you remotely too, whether that’s on your own website, in the cloud or within a file sharing folder. Many of these services are free and come prepared with industry standard security and protection. Storing things in this manner makes disaster recovery so much easier. Experts state that if you don’t have your valuable documents securely backed up in at least three locations you might as well not bother.

With your files backed up this way there is more space on your disk meaning speed, another way to improve start up times is to look at the programmes that run on start up, that is the programmes which come on when you switch your machine on.There will probably be many and in reality the majority of them, if any aren’t going to be so useful that they have to start running automatically every time you power up. On the control panel you can look at which programmes start in this way and change them so they only start running when you select them. These few titbits of advice will have your computer running so neatly you’ll wonder why you even thought about looking at laptops