The first step to improving the performance of your PC running Windows Vista is to de-fragment your hard drive.
To do so, choose start, control panel, system, maintenance, and scroll down to de-fragment your hard drive in the administrative tools.
In the disk defragmenter window, to the left of the de-fragment now button is note about whether your system requires de-fragmenting. If it does, click de-fragment now.
A message appears that Windows is de-fragmenting your drive and it might take up to a few hours to complete.
When the de-frogging process is complete, the disk defragmenter window shows that your drive no longer requires de-fragmenting.
Because disk de-fragmenting can take a while, if you have energy saving features active, such as a screen saver, they could cause the defragmenter to stop and start all over again. So disable screen saver and sleep mode.
To disable the screen saver, right click on a blank area or the desktop and choose personalize, and then choose screen saver on the dialogue box. Click the drop down and select none. Then click OK. Close the personalization window.
To turn off sleep mode, click start, control panel, system and maintenance, then scroll down and choose power options. In the left pane, click change when the computer sleeps and you’ll notice the put to the computer to sleep row. Click the drop down on plugged in and choose never.
This is a good place to note that you should only de-fragment your hard drive when it is plugged in, because it can take a few hours to complete.
Scroll down, save changes. Close the window and now you’re ready to run defragmenter without interruptions.
Try running your defrag overnight. You could also set up the procedure to run automatically by checking the box run on a schedule then click modify schedule and choose selections that meets your needs. Click OK and close the defragmenter and the control panel.
Then next step in improving you PC’s performance, is to free up disk space. To do so, choose start, control panel, system and maintenance, and scroll down to administrative tools and choose free up disk space. In the dialogue box that appears, click the icon next to the kind of files you want to clean up. Then select the drive and click OK.
The resulting dialogue box tells you the amount of space that can be cleared in your hard drive, and displays the suggested files with a check box next to them.
Click one of the suggested files and you can read the descriptions below to learn what the files are. You can click view files, to actually see the files that you would be deleting in order to clean up disk space.
If you want to select additional files, simply place a check mark next to all of the files you want to delete. Click OK and then click delete files. The selective files are deleted, clearing up space on your hard drive. Close the control panel and you are finished.
Now Windows Vista should run with faster performance.
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