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You’ve got an older laptop and it’s starting to slow down some. It seems to take forever to open programs or apps, let alone even run them. Sure, you might see if you could trade it in or even just buy another one – but you can save some money and do some things to just improve your current laptop.
If you’ve got fast internet, that goes a really long way toward making your laptop experience a pleasant one. If you’re not happy with your current speed, whether it’s browsing web pages, streaming movies and/or uploading and downloading files, go to this page.
Please keep in mind that we’re talking about laptops that are running the Windows Operating System in versions 7, 8, or 10. Sorry, no Apple users here.
1. Close System Tray Programs
You’d be surprised how much you can improve a lot of things just by spending a few minutes looking at this. The reason for that is that your system tray can have programs that take up a lot of resources. As a result, that will decrease your laptop’s performance due to those programs starting up when you turn your laptop on.
The solution is simple: Click the arrow at the bottom right of your taskbar and close out anything that’s not necessary for use right away. Just ask yourself: Do I really need to have this program running at boot up? There are things that you can just open when you want to use them.
2. Clean Up Your Start-Up Process
Don’t confuse this with your system tray. There are certain programs that get added to your start-up when you have your desktop first open up. Some of them are really important – you want your antivirus or malware protector running immediately, for example. Others, though, can eat away at resources and clog up the speed of other programs.
All you’ve got to do is open the Task Manager by right-clicking on the taskbar and then choosing the Start-Up tab. You’ll see a list of programs and their impact on your laptop’s performance with “High,” “Medium,” and “Low.”
This next part is important. Don’t ignore it. While it might be tempting just to disable everything that reads as being “High” impact, some of those are extremely critical and if you turn them off, they can cause your laptop to stop working. Then you WILL need a new one. Google any processes that you aren’t sure of to learn their function and make sure you can safely turn them off.
3. Make Sure That Everything Is Up To Date
Microsoft is always updating Windows, whether it’s for security patches or performance fixes. Those updates can improve your laptop’s efficiency. Check to see if the developers of any programs or apps have created a new version. By making sure that everything is up to date, you can also make sure there are no issues with compatibility.
Want some other ways to possibly improve your older laptop? Get rid of unnecessary files, see what programs eat up a lot of resources, check your power options, remove programs that you don’t use, and run a disk cleanup program. Do all of those things on a regular basis and you should see improvement.
Sometimes, things just stop working due to age. But if you did the above things, you gave yourself the best chance of keeping your laptop running for as long as it possibly could. Then you can get a new one without any regrets.
