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Clean-Up the Start-Up
Why Your PC Slows Down the Longer You Own it

Symptoms of a sick PC

You may notice when you get a brand new PC out of the box it whizzes around like a top; flinging windows here and there and only taking moments to complete the most complicated tasks.

Then you start to notice it doesn't have the zing it once did. 

• The PC takes longer to start
• Programs take longer to open
• Error messages start to pop-up and say you have missing or corrupt files.
• Your screen flickers and your desktop Icons disappear and reappear frequently 

This is about the time most people go to their CD collection and dig out the reformat or recovery CD.  They toss it in the CD drive and minutes later their computer is back to the way it was when they first bought it.  It's so new that even all their valuable data is gone!

This is unnecessary most of the time and it pains me to think of how many people go through this process everyday.

The reason why your PC is sick

Your PC calculates millions of equations and algorithms in split seconds.  The more information that it needs to process, the longer you have to wait for the results.

The plain and simple answer to why your PC seems slows down so much is that it's overloaded!  It can only handle so many things at once before it cannot operate within it's optimal performance threshold; the computers ability to do multiple tasks at one time becomes more than it can handle efficiently.

Reasons why your PC slows down in time

The longer you have your computer, the more you want to do with it.  This usually means installing games and applications, downloading music and movies, editing photos and so on.  There are a few things that happen when you use you PC for things like this:

• You use up hard drive space and fragment your hard drive. This basically means that your hard drive has to sort through large areas of data scattered all over which compounds into taking longer to retrieve information.
• You use up memory (RAM) that gets allocated to other programs.  This is generally the biggest problem any PC user has.  This book addresses this issue later on.
• You may install incompatible or poorly written software for Windows that can cause problems.

Many of your problems can be fixed in MINUTES.  The number one problem I still find in slow computers to this day is that there are too many startup items loading when the PC boots up.  An optimized PC should have no more than a few programs starting when the PC loads.

Most people do not realize this, but most viruses, malware, and spyware can only be activated by loading on startup. If a virus is not loaded on startup, it is nothing more than a useless piece of data on your hard drive.

Just think, if you had 10 startup items loading when you boot your computer how much faster your computer would be if you prevented 7 unnecessary items from loading!

Some programs like Anti-Virus must load when you boot your PC up.  These programs can use a lot of system resources, but without them the risks out number the benefits. In the next few sections you are about to learn how to optimize your PC's performance.  Please read the Disclaimer section carefully as the tasks you are about to perform can cause problems if not followed correctly.