tips to speed up your PC

•      Find and remove duplicates :-

  You may advertently end up copying the same files to different locations on the computer. This leads to clogging of precious hard drive space. Both Windows and MAC users can use the free Easy Duplicate Finder (easyduplicatefinder.com) — a lightweight and feature-rich program that does the job fast. 

It lets you search various drives (including external storage such as flash drives and portable HDD) and generates reports of each scan. For photographers who want to find and remove duplicate photographs, a free program called Duplicate Photo Cleaner (duplicatephotocleaner.com) finds duplicates even if they were resized or edited. 

• Remove temporary files :-

Temporary files usually refer to browser files or those that get leftover when you install new applications. Ideally, they should be removed automatically by the respective program, but it doesn't always happen. 

As more and more temporary files clog up your computer, they eat up hard drive space and slow it down. Get the free CCleaner (piriform.com/ccleaner) which is available for both Windows and Mac. It makes short work of cleaning up your system's temporary files. Mac users can also use OnyX (titanium.free.fr) which offers advanced cleaning options. 

• Remove unwanted shortcuts :-

Most of us like having shortcuts to often used programs and files — this saves time and improves productivity. However, too many shortcuts can build up over time and make your desktop a mess. 

Several programs also automatically place a shortcut on the desktop during installation. Windows XP comes with a desktop cleanup wizard that scans your desktop for unused icons and removes them. Windows Vista, 7 and 8 users can use Bad Shortcut Killer to remove unwanted shortcuts from the desktop and start menu. 

•  Defrag to speed things :-

Up defragmentation organises the contents of your hard drive in a way which minimizes the time taken by the drive to access the stored files. The robust Defraggler (piriform.com/defraggler) is a great tool that offers the option to defrag the entire hard drive or just specific folder. It displays a drive map that shows how the space of your hard drive is utilised. 

Mac users usually do not need to defrag their drives because the OS automatically defrags files that are less than 20MB in size. (Note that if your computer uses flash-based storage, there is no need to defragment it) 

• Make it boot faster :-

As you install more programs, you might notice that your PC takes longer to boot up. This happens because many applications and services automatically initialise during the boot process. Soluto (soluto.com) is a free Windows utility that analyses your PC's boot up time and removes unnecessary startup programs. 

It even lets you individually select the programs you want to remove from startup. MAC users can do the same by going to System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items and removing applications that you do not want to open automatically when you log in.